Jeff Bezos is apparently getting more directly involved in politics. Bezos is the owner of the extremist political group “The Washington Post,” so he’s definitely not outside of politics, he has just previously rarely made his own comments from his personal Twitter account. I was shocked when he came out and accused Elon Musk of being a communist Chinese agent in a tweet. But apparently this is something he’s doing now.
He has come out and mocked Joe Biden’s Disinformation Board, claiming that it should investigate Biden’s nonsensical claims about inflation.
The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead. Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection. https://t.co/ye4XiNNc2v
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) May 14, 2022
Bezos is correct that corporate taxation is in no way related to inflation. They are two separate issues completely, the only connection being “economy stuff.”
If we were to try to seriously analyze this Joe Biden statement, the basic claim is apparently that if corporations paid more taxes, the government would not have to print so much money. This is just so dumb that it’s difficult to even process.
The first obvious moronism is just the differential in the numbers here. Amazon as the example is among the biggest companies in the world, and in 2021 it had a net gross of $33 billion, up from $21 billion in 2020. So if you put a 100% tax on Amazon’s income and bankrupt the company, you would barely be able to cover a month of the war on Russia. Further, “fighting the coronavirus pandemic” cost 5 trillion dollars – that is, 5000 billion dollars. You don’t really need a calculator here to see that raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 40% (or whatever number they want, some of them say 70%) would not make any impact on the government’s spending ledger.
Secondly, these public multinational corporations have become the backbone of the economy and putting a crippling tax burden on them would smother the economy. Amazon’s actual value is in its stock price. The company has a market cap of over a trillion dollars, and high stock prices combat inflation. Amazon having that kind of stock price also allows the company to engage in market activity that grows the GDP.
I am against the entire structure of the economy, and the way it is built around these mega-corporations. I think the economy should be built around the middle class. But that isn’t the situation we are in, and you’re not going to change this situation without first bolstering the middle class. Regardless of any of this, there just isn’t any relationship between corporate taxation and inflation. This is just simply a made up thing – it is literal disinformation fed to stupid people who don’t know anything about anything and just believe whatever the government tells them.
We have decades of policy designed to loot the middle class and bolster multinational corporations. The government has actively sought to destroy both small businesses and the wages of workers. The Democrats were as heavily involved in this looting as the Republicans. Remember that both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton agreed on NAFTA, and it was only Ross Perot talking about a “giant sucking sound.”
Trade is one issue, corporate tax v. small business tax is another issue, the monetization of the stock market is another issue, government export of debt and low interest rates bolstered by QE is yet another issue. Obviously, all these issues are linked in that they are “the economy,” but the government has universally made the worst and most destructive decisions on every single issue you can list, while Americans have paid no attention because they didn’t understand any of it, they were busy with their divorces and entertainment media, and the fallout from these government acts has a decades-long lag.
Blaming Amazon for the current situation is just unhinged. Amazon has not done anything other than take advantage of the climate the government has created.
The pivot from “Russia destroyed the economy” to “actually, it’s greedy corporations” is almost funnier than the pivot from “there is no inflation” to “inflation is good” to “this is an unmitigated disaster and it’s not our fault.”
As far as Bezos – it’s interesting to imagine that he could actually pivot from support of the Democrat Party to support of the burgeoning Silicon Valley revolt. Bezos is clearly just a totally scummy person, but I mean – he’s not Jewish. That means that he’s only committed to doing what is in his own financial interests. He’s not committed to any ideology, other than presumably transhumanism (which Musk is ostensibly also offering a clear path towards, while the Democrats seem to have lost the plot).
Who knows? No one knows. But Bezos lashing out against Biden is kind of a big deal.