The Story Behind Raging Moderates + Why Jeff Bezos Is Wrong About Taxes

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**Scott Galloway** (1:56)
Welcome to Office Hours, The Prof G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehours, theprofgmedia.com. Again, that's officehours, theprofgmedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question number one. Our first question comes from KGL on Substack. They ask, what do you think about Bezos' statement on taxes?
Okay. Well, let's listen to what he said.

**Jeff Bezos** (2:27)
So people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse and queens not pay taxes?
Why is a nurse and queens who make $75,000 a year, paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes? That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And so, and by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes. It's only 3%. We can find 3%.
So we don't have, it's a small amount of money for the government, you know that. And really it's, and the more I thought about it, to me it's kind of absurd that we're doing this. You know, we shouldn't be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They shouldn't be sending her an apology.

**Scott Galloway** (3:25)
Yeah. So I'm friends with Andrew Yang, and I thought that he, I think UBI was, I don't think UBI was a good, I hate the universal and basic income. And well, let me back up. I think Bezos talking about cutting taxes for people under the income of 75,000, is a bit of a deflection. And ultimately, I think what Amazon would probably do is lower their wages such that they ended up with the same take-home pay because I think Amazon is optimized for the supply demand of labor, not for what is social consciousness, as in many of their drivers have to pee in bottles because they don't want to take bathroom breaks to try and meet their productivity quotas. So I'm a little bit, I think it's a little bit cynical for a guy who pieced out Florida to spend more time with his father about the time he was about to sell his Amazon. In other words, in some, Mr. Bezos, sit the fuck down. I think you talking about cutting the taxes of people making less than $75,000, like how do I figure out an Amazon size eye roll?
The fact that this guy is also saying in the same breath with the same interview at CNBC, that there's no way that raising his taxes would help that same nursing queen. No, actually it would, would. Even if we don't create additional programs, it would at least reduce the deficit. There's just no getting around it. State taxes, exemption, capital gains, lower tax rates, being able to piece out from the state of Washington to Florida about the time you decide to sell your stock, despite the fact that you aggregated $120 billion in wealth using the great infrastructure and ecosystem of Washington. You just shouldn't lecture us. I think this is quite frankly, a deflection and a misdirect. I don't think he's genuine about his own view on taxation. Having said that, I do think that if Andrew wanted to be successful in framing this, I think the way you frame trying to get money to people to level them up is not by saying universal basic income, that sounds socialist. I would have framed it as a negative income tax, and that way you get Republicans on board. Republicans like the idea of cutting taxes. So say we're going to cut taxes and make a negative income tax. And so for example, and by the way, you would, there'd be a big argument over whether it's universal child care or services because the problem when you give people services and just not pay cash is you create a government bureaucracy that never goes away. And there's a lot of NGOs in Europe that give a lot of money to needy people in Africa. But what they found is they're better off just giving the money to people in Africa as opposed to creating these large infrastructures of people, of administrators who get paid, who are overeducated to think big thoughts and host lunches and talk about famine in Africa. You're better off just giving money to people in Africa and say go buy your own food. And figure out what to do. They also, and this is sexist, but I'll say it, give money to the women because you give money to the dudes and the prostitutes and the bars thrive. You give money to the women and the kids get taller and fatter. Anyways, I think that negative income tax is a really good idea. Whether you give it to people in the form of services, universal child care, health care subsidies, I don't know. I'd want to see studies on that. But yeah, I agree. We need to figure out a way to put more money in the pockets or help lower and middle class people keep more of their money. I'm down with that, but we got to pay for it, Mr. Bezos. The fact that you've aggregated $120 billion in wealth. People say, people demonize billionaires like Bezos, and I don't agree with the far left either, that he didn't earn his money. He was born to a single mother when she was 17 He's a genius. He deserves to have earned $120 billion in wealth.