Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is trotting out a familiar, false line of attack against Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, who co-sponsored the Met Gala this year.
“If Jeff Bezos can drop $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala, he can afford to pay his fair share in taxes,” she wrote on X.
What would it mean for Bezos to pay his fair share? Is his fair share more than $2.7 billion? Because that’s how much he likely paid in taxes in 2024, according to Forbes.
Bezos’ wealth largely consists of the stock he owns in Amazon. When he cashes in shares of stock, he pays taxes. That’s how it works for everyone. It doesn’t make sense to tax people based on the theoretical value of the stock they own; that would mean taxing unrealized gains, i.e., the projected value of the asset before it’s sold. Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), a progressive and supporter of heavier taxation on billionaires, at one point understood that such a tax would discourage entrepreneurs from investing in their own companies and instead force them to sell off assets to private equity firms.
And what if the value of the company falls? Should the government pay back the money under such a scheme, or would an unrealized gains tax work in just one direction? This is obviously unworkable.
Moreover, the broader leftist notion—one made popular by Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.)—that the rich are paying less in taxes than everyone else is simply false. The U.S. tax code is extremely progressive: Lower-income people shoulder a significantly smaller tax burden than richer Americans. For federal income tax, the vast majority of revenue—upwards of 97 percent—is raised off the top half of income earners.
It’s possible to further raise taxes on rich Americans, of course. New York City and California have proposed to do just that. They may find out, however, that the wealthy can only put up with so much pain before they flee to red states. That’s because the federal government is already confiscating an obscene amount of money from them.
