Kara Swisher called out Jeff Bezos on Friday for attempting to argue that raising his federal taxes wouldn’t help lower-income households in America.
On Friday’s episode of her “Pivot” podcast, Swisher and co-host Scott Galloway mocked the Amazon founder following a viral interview he did earlier this week. In it, Bezos said poorer Americans should not be paying income taxes at all. That should be the focus, and the taxes of millionaires and billionaires shouldn’t raise because it wouldn’t help anyone.
“Let’s just give it a whirl,” Swisher said. “So disingenuous in this interview.”
Swisher also went after the billionaire’s physical appearance: “Come on, Jeff. Like seriously. I get that there’s a lot of face work going on and a lot of other enhancements, but it’s gone to your head.”
She continued: “Let’s try, Jeff. Even if you pay billions, you have billions. And the fact that I pay more of a percentage of my taxes than you — and then don’t even get me started with corporations. So anyway, the whoel thing. And also, he didn’t look well, in my opinion. And since he’s spent so much time on cosmetic stuff, I feel like I can comment on this.”
“I don’t blame him for tax evasion, I blame our government for letting him engage in it,” Galloway added. “But quite frankly, Jeff, when you start trying to wallpaper over the tax avoidance of billionaires by claiming you care about nurses, sit the f–k down. Just sit down. This is a misdirect … When a guy has so optimized the dynamics of supply and demand of labor such that his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles to make their quotas, you’re just not the person to pretend to have empathy for that nurse in Queens.”
Bezos spoke with CNBC earlier this week when he laid out his loose idea of how different incomes should be taxed. He thought since low income, working Americans are already contributing a smaller total of all tax revenue, they just shouldn’t be taxed at all — but added that the rich shouldn’t have theirs raised either.
“The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes,” Bezos said. “I think it should be zero. Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?”
He added: “To me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology. It really makes no sense.”
Watch the full “Pivot” episode above.
