The debate Bezos is missing, or avoiding, is about the difference between tax incidence and tax visibility. Federal income tax is the most visible part of the American tax burden precisely because it shows up as a single line on a pay stub. But visibility isn't the same as weight. A serious proposal to help struggling households would start with payroll taxes, which are regressive by design and cap out in a way that systematically favors high earners, or with consumption taxes, which take a larger share of income from people who spend most of what they make. There's also a fiscal arithmetic problem that the proposal quietly sidesteps. If the bottom half of earners accounts for only 3% of federal income tax revenue, eliminating that share doesn't free up meaningful money for those households — it just shifts the accounting. The nurse in Queens gets $1,000 a month back, but if the services that keep her neighborhood functional get underfunded as a result, the net gain is far less obvious than Bezos makes it sound. The smartest version of this argument would be a straight expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which already functions as a negative income tax for the working poor and has decades of evidence behind it. Bezos doesn't mention it, probably because it already exists and doesn't need a billionaire to champion it.
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