Why Jeff Bezos wants to cut your taxes

追加: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]All right, welcome back to Gary's Economics. Today we are going to explain why Jeff Bezos wants to cut your taxes.

[00:00:10]Interesting one this week. We're going to go over to the US, our surprisingly tall little brother, uh, which is a country I've not looked at too much recently. For a bit of context, the tax the super rich movement has been growing a lot in basically how much public attention it's been receiving in the US for a couple of reasons. Number one, they have a big vote on a uh tax on the super rich in California coming up in November. And number two, Zoran Mandani has become mayor of New York and he's aggressively trying to tax the rich, including bringing in a tax on unoccupied second homes in New York City. And this has really brought a lot of spotlight to the idea of tax the rich in the US. there's going to be a vote in November and a lot of people uh including the American very rich are not happy about it. And Jeff Bezos, who is the world's fourth richest man with a wealth of approximately about 280 billion dollars, uh did an interview for CNBC this week where he kind of argued that we shouldn't tax the rich. It's been talked about a lot in the press, especially over in the US. It's a really good opportunity for us to look at what Jeff Bezos is saying, understand why he is saying it and basically understand like where we are at the moment in the kind of global fight against inequality for a fair tax system for for fair taxation of the super rich. um what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are, how it's being attacked, and basically how we need to be smart and what we need to understand in order to get that fair attack system that we need. Okay, so let's jump straight into the interview.

[00:01:53]Now, the the headline moment was Jeff Bezos arguing that people on average salaries should pay less tax.

[00:02:02]>> Yeah, I you know, I started thinking about this and doing some research. A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays 12 more than $12,000 a year in taxes.

[00:02:18]Does that really make sense? So people talk about, you know, making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? Why is somebody at all? Why is some Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?

[00:02:39]>> That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything.

[00:02:44]>> Okay, so at the first glimpse, this might seem interesting. Uh why do we have a billionaire arguing for ordinary people to pay lower taxes? you know, these are at the current at the moment we have a tax system where billionaires pay very low taxes almost nothing and ordinary people pay if you add up all of their taxes, you know, close to 50%. Um, so it's a great tax system balance in favor of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires.

[00:03:10]But he's saying ordinary people should pay less tax. Okay, interesting perhaps surprising. Why is he saying that? Uh, really the answer is very very simple.

[00:03:20]In order to know that we just simply need to see the question that he was answering. So here is the question that Jeff Bezos was asked and his response was cut taxes on uh teachers.

[00:03:32]>> But one of the topics that I thought we should talk about and maybe even start with >> Yeah.

[00:03:37]>> is these days it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America, uh about the billionaire class, >> um about wealth inequality and policy and and everything else. Uh, and it's taken a a uniquely critical turn, I think. And I'm so curious before we even get into everything else, what you think about that right now.

[00:04:03]>> Okay. So, the question was uh quite delivered in quite a roundabout way by CNBC. Basically, everybody's talking about taxing the the super rich. Uh, you are super rich. What do you think about it? And that is the question um in response to which Jeff Bezos eventually got round to saying I think that ordinary teachers should pay less tax.

[00:04:25]Um now if we first analyze this uh from an economic perspective at a surface level this is like quite a like strange argument right because just at its most basic you so Jeff Bez has very intentionally picked a salary level $75,000 a year which is quite close to the American average you the average man or woman paying less taxes is just quite obviously not a substitute for billionaires paying more taxes, right?

[00:04:58]Like if we're in a situation where government needs more tax money and Jeff Bezel says, "How about instead of that we we charge ordinary workers less tax money?" That doesn't solve the problem of of tax money. Right? This is a bit like you and I go to a restaurant and uh you know that I'm like loaded because you've been reading the Daily Mail and you are like struggling for money and you say at the end of the meal, "Hey, listen. You know, how about maybe you know you cover this one." Um and I say, "Listen, forget about that. I've got a better idea. I'm not going to pay for it, but how about you don't pay for it?"

[00:05:35]Like this is it. It's it doesn't really um especially in the UK context where um you know government finances are quite stretched but increasingly US finances are quite stretched as well. The US has a large and and a large deficit and a large and rapidly growing debt and borrowing costs in the US are rising like they are here. Um it it doesn't it's a strange argument, right? It's a strange argument to say okay well tax money is needed so instead of me paying more, how about you pay less? And it would be easy and before I made this video, I watched a lot of there's been a lot of US media about this and a lot of people kind of likeing on Jeff Bezos a little bit, but I think it would be easy to dismiss this as like, well, this is like a dumb argument, especially if you're viewing it from the UK perspective because we had just a few years ago, we had a prime minister of his trust who basically came in like with this tax strategy of what we're going to do is we're going to cut tax on billionaires and we're going to use that to cut tax on working people. And what happened is like basically immediately it caused like an enormous economic crisis. This is not a fully fleshed out um economic argument. But I think it's a bit rash to to immediately disregard it because I think to a degree it is an intelligent argument from a kind of like a rhetorical like a persuasive perspective for like a very simple reason. Right? So Jeff Bezos when he when he made this argument he used a lot of numbers um and uh numbers catch people's attention especially when they are amounts of money and Jeff Bezos he hits this number $75,000 um a teacher in Queens and $75,000 which is a little bit above the American average which means $75,000 will be quite close to the salary of a lot of Americans who watch this video and as soon as they hear that they'll be like oh that's somebody similar to me, similar financial situation to me. And then he says, we didn't show this in the clip, but he says, you know, they're paying $12,000 a year taxes. That's like $1,000 um a month in taxes, and they could use that money to pay their bills or or to pay their rent or, you know, to take care of their family. And what he's doing there is he's using the persuasive power of of money and he's saying, "Well, listen, if you come with me, you can get this $1,000 a month. And wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be great if you if you could have $1,000 a month?" and he's contrasting that to what what seems to many people to be a kind of abstract concept like and and he's trying to make it seem like you have this like dichotomy like you have this choice you have you have two things you can choose from you can either choose more taxes for me Jeff Bezos and he says specifically in this interview that's not going to that doesn't solve anything you know that's not going to help you or what we could have is less tax for you $1,000 every single month in your pocket. And obviously, as I've said, like you don't need to dig far into it before you realize like this is, you know, this is not just not taxing anyone is is not a really at all a feasible economic strategy. But you know, we live in a world where people for better or worse are a little bit obsessed with money. We live in in a society which is obsessed with money. We live in an economy where a lot of people are struggling for money. And if this guy turns around and says, "Look, these guys are trying to tax me, but we have an alternative, which is to give every single one of you $1,000 a month." It's going to be like potentially quite persuasive, right? And when I saw it, like it shouldn't be funny because it's like a really serious issue and you know my whole channel is about this but it is quite what what made me laugh about this is it immediately reminded me of like this is how you distract like a child or a baby who who is doing something that you don't like. You say to hey look do you want to use a iPad? You want to get some ice cream? you know, you just you just switch you just switch the conversation immediately away from something you don't want the child to do. Don't text me. And you say, "Oh, but you know, if you do what I want, I'll give you a thousand dollars a month, you know." And of course, Jeff Bezos knows like he he's probably not going to get this policy that that he's he's demanding. But it doesn't matter because all he's trying to do is just distract you away from the thing that he doesn't want you to talk about by giving you this like alluring thing here like a who doesn't want $1,000 a month that would be like fantastic basically. Um and it takes advantage of like a lack of basically economics understanding. Um, and I think this is the reason why I try so hard to like create a public that just has a basic understanding of basic economic ideas. Um, you know, I've done videos in the last couple of years.

[00:10:31]I did one saying like forget about money. And the big idea for the forget about money video was forget about money because money is confusing. Um, and you know, the government can print money and it can do a lot of things, but what the government can't print is is resources. And at any given amount of time, there's a certain amount of resources. There's a certain amount of housing, a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of raw materials, a certain amount of transport, a certain number of cars. And these will be distributed in a certain way. And when you understand that, you realize that this idea that Jeff Bezos is suggesting, how about you let me keep my money and then I will give you more money is like kind of like a nonsense.

[00:11:14]We can't just like suddenly create more money, Jeff Bezos gets more money and you get more money. But I think it will appeal to some people.

[00:11:24]It's taking advantage of like a lack of economic understanding. this idea that like there's um there's an American movie from a few years ago called Idiocracy which I actually tried to watch and I didn't think it was actually a great movie but there's a great scene where you know there's a guy's running to be president and he says well what I'm going to do is I'm just going to give everybody more money and he takes that sort of like machine gun he starts like firing money into the audience because of course we can print out money but at the end of the day there is competition for real resources um we exist in economies where billionaires pay very low rates of tax Um, Jeff Bezos himself has paid, if you look at his life, he's worth about $280 billion.

[00:12:03]He's paid, I think, something like $8 billion of tax, which means on his lifetime income, he's paid something like 3% on his whole lifetime income.

[00:12:10]You're paying 50%. His glass is getting aggressively richer. Your glass is getting aggressively poorer. You don't know these things. And he's saying, "Listen, come with me. I'll get richer and you'll get richer." And what this plays on is basically the fact that we all hate tax. We all hate politicians.

[00:12:32]We all hate the media and we're looking for somebody else who who's going to save us, right? And I think this reminds me very much of basically what what Elon Musk does and what Donald Trump does where they portray themselves as I'm not a politician. I'm a businessman. I know how to make money. Come with me. I'll I'll get rich. I'll make you rich. And I think it would be too much to simply dismiss this, right? You know, these guys, what they're trying to do is portray themselves as the sensible guys in the room, um the guys who are smarter than the politicians. And really, they're kind of fishing, you know, this is like $1,000 on the end of a hook. and they're hoping that you will bite that and you will accept a system which is aggressively impoverishing you. So when I see this, what it tells me is that obviously here in the UK, the voice of the wealth tax movement is is is me and I run I am, you know, a financial trader and I run essentially this economics educational channel and everything I do is about educating the public that if you don't want to get poorer, you have to tax the rich. But in other countries like the US where I'm not such a well-known voice, a lot of the argument has been about fairness, has been about justice, and it is vulnerable to basically somebody who is a billionaire coming in and saying, "No, ignore that. These guys are not talking about how to make you rich. I will make you rich." Um, so I think the next thing you should recognize when you see this argument of let's not tax me more, let's tax working people less is I think it highlights a little bit the stupidity in a way of the way we discuss tax in the media which is we talk about we should tax these people more, this people less. Um, and sometimes you talk about spending, we should do more of this spending or we should do less of that spending without realizing that these things have to be funded essentially. And people are only really able to come out with these sort of ridiculous suggestions like let's just tax everybody less because we don't connect the tax side and the spending side. Um, and you know obviously there is also the option of borrowing more but or even printing money but if whenever you say we should cut taxes you need to be clear okay where is that going to come from?

[00:14:59]where is the money going to come from basically in whichever way and this is why from a couple of years ago now we've really been pushing the like the tax wealth not work message because even in this country I think that from very very early on because people don't really understand the difference between like a billionaire and which is a billion is just an insane amount of money. It's like it's really not in any way realistically attainable to an ordinary person. Whereas a million is still maybe something you could get if you manage to get a good job or if you inherit a house from your parents. They use this confusion between a billionaire and a millionaire such that when somebody like me or somebody like Gabriel Zukman or somebody like Zoran Mandani or Zach Balansky says increase tax on the very rich, they want you to think we're trying to tax you. And it's this classic bait and switch that when I say tax the super rich more, they say watch out for Gary. He's trying to tax you more. And that is why I've been really aggressively focusing on this like tax wealth not work message. Now tax wealth not work is, you know, although it's extremely concisely summarized, it is a coherent economic message because we take some money from this group and we give that money to this group and it's like balanced from a government perspective. what Jeff Bezos is suggesting which is tax me less and tax you less it it raises the obvious question of like where does that money come from I mean what Jeff Bezos actually said was should we tax you more and he's like don't talk about that let's tax the viewer less and he's doing this thing which I often do in my interviews which is when I'm being interviewed by someone who is maybe a bit of a [ __ ] which happens sometimes rather than debate the interviewer who is often debating me in bad faith jump over the interviewer go to the audience and say, "Listen, I'm the one who is on your side." Basically, and Jeff Bezos is doing this, but it has the obvious weakness of where does the money come from? And the interviewer picks it up and says, "Okay, well, you want to tax ordinary people less. How about we fund that by taxing you more?"

[00:16:59]>> Should you be paying higher taxes to pay for the 3% component part of this that you think is going to need need to be paid for, if not more than that, given the debts we have? It's certainly a perfectly valid policy debate, >> right, >> to say, do we want an even more progressive tax system. So, you know, the kind of the line that gets uh quoted all the time is, you know, the wealthy should pay their fair share, right?

[00:17:26]>> And we can argue about what the fair share is. That's a policy debate. That's okay. We actually have a spending problem and it and that's a skills issue. I mean, let me give you an example. the New York City school system, >> right? They spend $44,000 per student, 44,000. That's 30% more per student than other big cities like Chicago, LA, and Boston. If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, >> right, >> your packages would take six weeks to arrive. We'd have to charge you a $100 delivery fee. and then when the package did finally arrive, it'd have the wrong item in it anyway.

[00:18:11]>> So, this is Jeff Bezos's next argument, which is it's kind of the the shallowess of his first argument, which is like, hey, let's just not tax anyone. Um, is exposed pretty quickly. Um, that was I don't think you'll find any economists that say like this is like really feasible. Just don't tax anyone.

[00:18:33]Um, you'll struggle to find that working anywhere.

[00:18:36]So if you want to cut taxes on workers, which is what Jeff Bezos is really pushing, maybe we should tax you more.

[00:18:42]Uh you you Jeff Bezos. And then Jeff Bezos again throws the ball away. It's another distraction which is like no actually the real problem is a spending problem. And he uses this term which he uses I think he uses it seven times in the whole interview which is skills. He says it's um it's a skills issue and now he's moved the argument on to something which is at least in theory more economically feasible. So his first argument is okay should we tax you more?

[00:19:17]And he's like how about we tax working people less? Um and that's nice. It's it's bait for working people because working people want to pay less tax, but like it really is not economically complete because we can't just start taxing everybody less unless we want to do austerity. Um, and in countries like the UK where we've seen austerity that's been incredibly painful. So then he says, "Okay, okay, we can tax working people less without taxing more by cutting government spending." and he kind of floats this idea that government spending at the moment is is wasteful. It's it's inefficient.

[00:19:57]Um I'm really interested in his repeated use of this term skills issue which I'll get into a little bit more later.

[00:20:06]And once again, what you have is an argument which on the surface is appealing. And the reason that it's appealing is because everyone hates government. Um it's becoming more and more widely like accepted in public opinion that politicians are like [ __ ] and like governments are wasteful. So like yeah like you know of course like we want to reduce government waste and we want to increase government inefficiency and we want to improve government skills. So like yeah like great argument Jeff Bezos like like who's going to disagree with you and um I think this this in itself is the weakness of the argument you know if you suggest that the way to fix something is to do something which absolutely everybody in the country wants to do then you're probably not offering anything particularly of value right like I think you know the population of the UK 66 million you'd struggle to find you know 50 people who don't think we should reduce government waste and who don't think we should increase government efficiency and who don't think we should increase government skills you and it's the same in the US like every single politician ever has come in saying we're going to fix this problem by decreasing government waste and improving government efficiency so if that was a thing that you could quite simply just do given that absolutely everybody in the whole world wants to do it we would have already done it by now, right? And it it's it's meaningless, but it's popular. So once again, what you see here is Jeff Bezos using kind of like weaponizing, I guess, in a way like a lack of broad economic understanding in the public. So in the first case he offers something which is like not really possible which is like how about nobody pays tax and and then everybody will be rich um which is great because everybody hates tax and then he says well how about we just like make the government efficient because the government is like rubbish um and and I'm Jeff Bezos and I will give my skills to the government. Um and this is popular because government is like really really hated. Um, and what he's trying to do here is basically set up an alternative like boogeyman um to to himself and the billionaires, which is government is [ __ ] tax is [ __ ] And this is like in many ways like a good persuasive argument because the the bogeyman you are creating is somebody who is already hated. Everybody hates government and everybody hates taxes.

[00:22:46]And it's quite funny because another thing which Jeff Jeff Bezos says early in the interview is um >> politicians are they're using this age-old technique of you know picking a villain and pointing fingers but the problem is that doesn't solve anything.

[00:23:04]>> So Zippers is asked early on in the interview, you know, should rich people pay tax and he basically says you know these guys are pointing their fingers at me and the billionaires and it's saying my fault it's my fault but look pointing fingers doesn't solve anything. Um, basically what you need to do is like replace the government because the government are are rubbish and you should get rid of taxes because taxes are are rubbish. Um which is which is pointing the fingers in a way that doesn't solve anything because the two things which you have suggested are one thing which is impossible which is to cut taxes on everybody without reducing government services and another thing which absolutely everybody ever has agreed with and tried to do and failed which is to reduce government inefficiency. you know, if I step back and I look at what has happened on the whatever you want to call it, the tax the rich movement or the, you know, the anti- inequality movement or the wealth tax movement in the last like 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. Um, like if you'd have told me 10 years ago or 5 years ago or two years ago, we would be where we are now where this issue is like constantly one of the big issues in politics when it when the economy is discussed. uh where like billionaires like Jeff Bezos would feel like they have to apply on it where we're getting wealth taxes all over the world even in countries which have right-wing governments I I wouldn't have believed you. Um but I think the one thing which I've been trying to provide which we don't have enough of in other wealth tax movements around the world is this clear simple economic message which is the reason your living standards are falling is because of growing inequality. And I think that is made clear by Jeff Bezos saying exactly that in this interview that taxing me doesn't solve anything. it's not going to help that that that nurse in in Queens. We need to make the case that it does. We need to make the case that it will. Um and really like the whole story of the history of this channel is me sort of every week trying to make that case um in a different way. I think if you if you want like one simple video that you need to watch on this channel to understand like why growing inequality is what is hitting living standards. I would recommend watching the video from last year called the squeeze out which basically explains that you know once you stop taxing rich people at high rates which we did in the 80s they start to generate an enormous amount of income they start to buy up the assets they get richer asset prices go up more and more ordinary people can't afford to buy assets anymore and eventually you see wealth ownership the ability to own squeezed out of the working class and squeezed out of governments and then obviously people have nothing left and they start their living standards for fall. I think that is the best video we've made that explains the economic case. I mean, and Jeff Bezos himself is an excellent example, right? So, Jeff Bezos is, if uh Google can be trusted, worth about $280 million. Um, >> sorry. Yeah, thanks. Jeff Bezos, I made the mistake myself there. Jeff Bezos is worth $280 billion, which means that if he makes uh 5% a year, which um he'll almost certainly make significantly more than that, he's going to make $14 billion a year, which is something like $1 billion every four weeks. So, he's making, you know, $250 million a week.

[00:26:41]So, he's making like 30 or $40 million a day. Really, if you want to understand why having untaxed billionaires hurt your living standards, you don't really need to understand anything more than that. Once you have a class of people making 30 or $40 million a day, imagine you making $40 million a day.

[00:27:05]How much would you spend? You know, I I I couldn't even imagine spending like $100,000 a day. Okay, so let's assume you spend $100,000 a day. Um, you know, and then you got another you've still got another, you know, $28 million still, you know, to spend you have no choice but to slowly buy all of the assets in the entire world. You know, that that is that is what is going to happen and that is exactly what is happening. And then what that means is other groups of society will lose their ownership of assets and we will eventually end up in the kind of extremely unequal world that we have been in. So this is the the point that I want you to understand as much as you can. The growing wealth of the billionaire class is the reason that you are getting poorer. This is the reason you can't afford a house. It's the reason your government wealth is collapsing. You know the these two things are the same thing. You cannot have one tiny minority people that own everything and not have everybody else owning nothing. Um, so I think this, you know, a lot of people have been on Bezos this week and I think it was kind of I think his intervention was ultimately kind of dumb and I think it will be self-defeating, but he's highlighted one really important thing. We need to as much as possible clarify, simplify, make clear the economic reasons why allowing the billionaires to be untacked and to own everything will and is making ordinary people poorer. And I want to finish on one last bit of sort of um business jargon which Jeff Bezos taught me. So what did he say after he said you know Amazon could fix this? If we have a problem at Amazon, you know, the way we would fix it is we would go in and we do the five W's and we try to get to a root cause. We try to find a root fix and then when we fix it at the root, you're fixing it forever.

[00:29:01]>> So, do did you know what the five W's are? Five W. I didn't look it up. The five W is basically this idea. You have a problem and um I find it interesting as well. Basically, you just keep asking why, why, why uh until you find the reason, which is um once again, exactly like what kids do. Um Jeff Bezos, a lot of similarities to a young child, it seems. Um so, let's get into this. All right, let's get into this five W's. Why can't you afford to to to buy a house?

[00:29:31]You know, what is what is the reason?

[00:29:32]You know, why is that happening? The answer to that, I think, is because you are increasingly competing with a class of unbelievably rich people who are making $30 million every single day for the ownership of of the assets in the world. You know, if if you look at the countries and the the places in history where housing is affordable, they are countries that do not have incredibly wealthy billionaire classes, you know, like Europe in the the period after the World War II. And if you look at the countries where housing is unaffordable, like like now, these are places where you have these super wealthy billionaires. Um, they're buying everything. Of course, they're buying everything. It's not just housing that's getting expensive. Assets in general are becoming expensive because you're competing with billionaires. Okay, but the five W's. Okay, we keep asking, okay, well, why why do we have um a super super wealthy billionaire class now when we didn't have that in the ' 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the ' 80s and the '90s when housing was um much more affordable? Well, the answer is quite simply because in the 80s we stopped taxing billionaires effectively. Uh we used to have very high rates of tax in the golden age of capitalism after World War II. We had incredibly high rates of tax on the rich. In this country, I think we had 95% top income tax, 90% top inher inherit inheritance tax on the very rich. And what that meant was rich people like Jeff Bezos were not able to do this thing where you have an enormous amount of income and you just reinvest it and reinvest it and reinvest it and you get compound interest and it grows exponentially and eventually I own the wholeing world. Okay. So why did that happen? Why did we stop taxing um the super rich in the 80s? The answer was because uh we lost an argument about tax and and inequality and and distribution. Um and people like Margaret Thatcher and Reagan managed to convince the public that not taxing billionaires would be good for them. And why did that happen?

[00:31:36]because quite simply we forgot the thing which you know our grandparents and great-grandparents and great great grandparents understood which was that distribution and inequality matters. You know, it's as simple as that. And I've said it time and time again. Now, if we have an intelligent, educated public that understands one simple thing, which is that if you allow inequality to grow rapidly, it will hurt living standards, then we will be 70, 80, 90% towards winning this battle. And I think that that is where we need to be. um whether you're here in the UK or in the US uh giving all your money to Jeff Bezos or in Germany or in Australia or in France or in Italy or Spain or any of these countries, we need to be in a situation where if you go outside and pull your average man or woman off the street and say, "Why are living standards falling?"

[00:32:31]The answer that the majority of them give you is because inequality is rising. Once we get to that situation, then we will be able to fix this problem. That is your answer to Jeff Bezos's five wise. And the truth is, and I almost don't believe myself saying this. Um, we're getting there. We're getting there. We're getting there all around the world. Um, you know, here in the UK, and I'll talk about this some more next week, we're going to get a new prime minister. Uh, it could be as soon as the next couple of months. Um it might it might take a year but when that new prime minister comes in they will really really really really really struggle to win the confidence of the public unless they deliver something on inequality and the reason for that is quite simply because the British public understands now that if you don't act on inequality their living standards will fall and I've been all across the world you know in the last year or so I've been obviously Australia New Zealand we had Gabriel Zukman here from France last week, you know, but I've been to Italy and Portugal and Sweden and Norway and and people are starting to understand this all over the world and we are reaching a situation where when even a even even a right-wing government, you know, comes in in Hungary, they have no choice but to take action in equality. And you know, I think it's amazing the progress that we've made, but the fact that Bezos feels they can come out on TV and say taxing me is not going to help you shows that we have more distance to go. We need to make that clear message for the public to understand. Of course it affect us. Of course it affect us. If we allow a class like you to own everything then we will go back to where we were in Europe 300 400 500 years ago where the wholeing world is owned by like 20 guys and the rest of us live in desperate poverty. You know this is part of the foundation of America. this idea that you cannot have, you know, this all of the wealth owned by a few people, but also when I see Jeff Bezos come out, it gives me hope to be honest because, you know, when when I first started working on on inequalities, 2011 is when I first started working on it and nobody was interested in this and we've been pushing it. We've been pushing it. You know, people like me and Gabriel Zukman, but also the guys, you know, so many different people all across the world that have done great work on this. It reaches the point now where the fourth richest man on the world, you know, feels like he needs to go on YouTube and chat a load of [ __ ] to fight people like us. Um, to fight people like you, stop you from getting your fair share of the pie.

[00:35:11]There's this famous quote which is probably not real quote which is first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win and I've been doing this work for 15 years now and the truth is I was ignored for probably about 12 and a half of those years and you know even if you look at you know I mention it so often but when when Zack Palansky went on the rest of politics and they pointed him and laughed at him essentially and said what are you talking about you're an idiot there's no economists you know and then we go and pull out seven Nobel prize winning economists you you know, and Gabriel Zukman from France and say, "Listen, you know, we've got them. We've got the economists. We're winning. Jeff Bezos is a very wealthy man, and he's not going to waste his time and his money buying newspapers and coming out on TV uh and arguing shouldn't be taxed unless we were winning. You know, we forced them into this." And when I see these guys coming out and and, you know, putting themselves on the front lines kind of stupidly to be honest. Um Jeff Bezos trying to make himself like the voice on opposing wealth taxes. I think it's kind of stupid, but it shows them that we've got them backed into a corner here. Um and I didn't believe this for years and years and years and years and years. But the fact is I do think we're going to win. I do think we're going to win. But we can't be complacent.

[00:36:30]When Jeff Bezos comes out and makes those arguments, we do need to understand that some people are going to listen to that. We cannot let the billionaires be the voice of aspiration.

[00:36:40]Listen, if you look at countries where people have been able to go from poverty to being rich, these were not countries which had aggressively growing inequality. If you allow your country to be a country where the poor get poorer every year and the rich get richer every year, that will not be a world where ordinary people like you can can get into being financially secure. We need to move away from an economic system where wealth is being drained away from the many and accumulated by the super rich and towards an econ economic system where wealth circulates around. But listen, the rich are getting richer. Uh they'll buy themselves a lot of newspapers and a lot of media channels and they'll put a lot of um silly videos on the internet.

[00:37:23]What we need is an educated public that understands one simple message. If we allow inequality to get worse and worse and worse, then you and your kids and your grandkids will be living in poverty. So, in answer to Jeff Bezos, it will make a difference. If we tax the super rich, it will make a difference.

[00:37:43]That is the only way that we can get wealth back in the hands of working people. And that is the only way that you and your kids can be rich. Tax wealth not worked. Thank you very much.