Jeff Bezos says raising his taxes is pointless.

He’s partly right. Bezos has gotten away with paying no income tax in some years, so technically doubling that wouldn’t help. 

That’s why we need a wealth tax that even the slipperiest of billionaires can’t wriggle their way out of.

That’s what my colleague, economist Gabriel Zucman, is proposing. 

He’s one of the top experts on wealth inequality and billionaire tax avoidance — two of the greatest threats to American freedom and democracy. Listen to this.

Forget the top 1 percent for a moment. Let’s talk about the richest ZERO POINT ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ONE PERCENT of Americans, which now includes 19 households. The oligarchs. 

Together they hold the equivalent of 14 percent of U.S. GDP in wealth: roughly $4 trillion. 

It means that if these 19 families spent their wealth, they could buy 14% of everything that’s produced in a given year in the US.

At the peak of the first Gilded Age at the beginning of the 20th century, that same group of the population owned just 4 percent of GDP in wealth. 

This is dangerous. 

There’s a fundamental tension between extreme wealth and democracy. That’s because extreme wealth is extreme power — the power to stifle competition, shape laws, buy elections, and stall social progress. 

In 2000, billionaires accounted for 1 percent of total campaign spending. In 2024 they accounted for 19 percent. 

Everything downstream of the political system is affected by the surge of billionaire influence: the courts, regulatory power, economic policy, and media independence. That’s how the super-rich have been able to rig the tax code to live nearly tax-free. 

Letting so much of America’s wealth go untaxed also starves the nation of resources. It prevents the US from making the necessary investments in higher education, in health care, in public infrastructure that are vital to future growth and prosperity.

So what can we do?

I’ve been studying inequality for years. One of the lessons of the first Gilded Age is that we instituted new taxes on the super rich to curb their power and build a fairer society. 

We need to do that again — but by taxing wealth, not just income. 

Taxing income alone isn’t sufficient, because the super-rich find ways to report little to no income. There was even one year when Jeff Bezos pretended he was so poor that he claimed and received the child tax credit.

Instead, we must tax wealth. In my book, We Need To Tax Billionaires, I’m proposing a minimum tax equal to 2 percent of wealth for people with net worth above $100 million dollars.

Someone already paying the equivalent of 2 percent or more of their wealth in taxes today would have nothing more to pay. 

It’s just those among the ultrarich who fail to pay their fair share who would owe anything. 

Despite this fair and logical proposal, Billionaire-owned media outlets fearmonger about taxing the rich, but don’t be fooled.

First, this wealth tax wouldn’t raise taxes on you or anyone you know. 

This wouldn’t raise taxes on millionaires or even most multi-millionaires. Only ultra-high-net-worth individuals with particularly low tax payments would be affected. It is the fairest tax you can imagine. 

Second, Billionaires wouldn’t be able to dodge this tax. 

Wealth is harder to manipulate and conceal than income. About half of billionaire wealth is in publicly-traded stock, which is straightforward to value. 

The value of private business assets, trusts, real estate, and even works of art can also be calculated. 

Billionaires regularly borrow against their assets because lenders and everyone else knows this is real wealth.

In 2023, when Mark Zuckerberg bought a half-billion-dollar mega yacht and a luxury compound in Hawaii, he didn’t have to sell off stock. 

He took a loan that year against $3 billion dollars of his Meta stock. 

Third, this wouldn’t result in tax flight: Billionaires cannot avoid this tax by moving assets or physically moving abroad. They would still have to pay this tax as a US citizen no matter where they live. 

Fourth, you may have heard that wealth taxes used to exist in Europe, but they didn’t work. 

But past wealth taxes in Europe largely exempted the super-rich because they did not tax large shareholding, or taxed them for only a fraction of their true value.

My proposal takes the opposite approach. It focuses squarely on the ultra-wealthy, with no exemptions.

The bottom line is taxing the rich is not only good for the economy, it’s a matter of basic equality under the law. 

Billionaires get away with paying a lower tax rate than middle-class workers when you factor in all taxes paid. A 2 percent minimum wealth tax on the richest of the rich would put an end to this absurdity. 

Fundamentally, it creates a new principle: that extreme wealth has to come with unavoidable duties toward society. 

This is not radical. 

What is truly radical is the current situation, where billionaires are allowed to live nearly tax free, using their fortunes to play by a different set of rules while they amass even more wealth and power — and effectively create their own Gilded society.

Trump says he doesn’t care, “Not even a little bit” about people’s finances. It’s the first time he’s actually told the truth.

Trump’s policies are forcing the typical American family (household) to pay thousands of dollars EXTRA for groceries, to visit the doctor, and to fill up their gas tanks. Here’s how. 

Trump’s illegal war on Iran, which nearly all Republicans have supported, has caused gas prices to skyrocket. Since he started the war, the average American household has spent an extra $417 on gas.

His war is also driving up the cost of groceries thanks to increased fuel and fertilizer costs. 

Trump’s tariffs, before they were ruled illegal, cost each American household an extra $1,700.

Consumers can expect little help to weather the storm. Trump slashed two crucial programs that supported food banks and school meals. That’s on top of the historic cuts he and Republicans have made to food stamps in their big, ugly bill.

Healthcare costs are also rising. Trump and Republicans cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, and more than 7 million people are predicted to lose coverage as a result.

Trump and Republicans in Congress refused to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, causing monthly premiums to increase by an average of nearly 60 percent. 1 in 5 ACA recipients have lost coverage this year.

And what about electric bills? They increased 13 percent in 2025 — and won’t be coming down anytime soon. Trump and Republicans' big, ugly bill is forecast to increase household energy bills, largely because of cuts to renewable energy programs. And Trump is fast-tracking power-hungy AI data centers, which are further increasing electric bills.

So if your life is getting more expensive, where is all your money going?

Straight to the pockets of giant corporations. Big Oil raked in more than $55 billion in windfall profits in just the first month of the Iran war. As for those illegal tariffs, only corporations will get a refund, even though most of them already passed those increased costs onto you. The devastating cuts to food stamps and Medicaid helped pay for tax cuts for the super-wealthy and corporations. And the AI data centers, helping drive electric bills higher, enrich the bottom lines of Trump’s Big Tech donors.

All this exacerbates the decades-long hoax of trickle-down economics, where corporations gobble up bigger and bigger pieces of the economic pie while workers get shafted. Today, workers’ share of the nation’s income is at the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947. Corporate profits’ share, on the other hand, is the highest it’s been since 1950.

Trump and Republicans in Congress are making our rigged system even worse.

There's a secretive force driving up your electricity bill, but it's NOT just data centers.

Let me explain…

Private utility companies, like PG&E, Exelon, Duke, and Edison, serve nearly 70 percent of electricity customers in the country. Even though they provide a public service that we all rely on to survive, they’re owned by investors and driven by maximizing profits.

They’re allowed to exist as monopolies because it’s too expensive and impractical for multiple companies to build and operate complicated electricity infrastructure. In exchange, private utilities submit to strict regulation that is supposed to keep them from price-gouging customers who have no other choices in the market. 

Every state has a utility commission that sets the rates we pay to keep our lights on. The rates are supposed to keep prices affordable for customers while making sure utilities can cover their operating costs and deliver a fair return to their investors.

But that’s not what’s happening. Private utility electricity rates have increased far more than inflation over the past few years. These rate hikes have delivered electrifying profits, which have surged by over 35 percent since 2021.

And it’s only going to get worse. In 2025 alone, private utilities demanded a record $31 billion in rate increases, affecting 81 million customers.

If your electricity bill is typically $200 a month, that means about $30 of it padded your private utility’s bottom line, instead of improving your service. These profits can go towards fancy corporate PR campaigns, private jet trips for executives, and lavish executive pay packages.

How are they getting away with this? Because there is no federal law barring private utilities from using your money for political activities, like lobbying legislators and commissioners and making campaign donations.

Private utilities’ lobbying hit a 10-year high last year. And in states where commissioners are elected, rather than appointed, candidates routinely take money from donors linked to the utilities that the commissioners are supposed to regulate.

Congress used to bar private utilities from making political contributions. But that federal law was repealed in 2005, allowing private utilities to make direct campaign contributions to regulators, politicians, and political parties. Some states still have stricter campaign finance laws that prevent these bribes — I mean, contributions. But in the states that don’t, commissions approved higher rates — enabling private utilities to each rake in, on average, an additional $4 million in profits every year.

This political spending isn’t just corrupt; it’s dangerous. The deadliest fire in California’s history, the 2018 Camp Fire, was caused by PG&E’s neglect of an aging transmission line. In the wake of that tragedy, PG&E spent nearly $10 million lobbying state lawmakers — with most of it going towards proposals to reduce its liability for wildfires.

The massive electricity rate hikes spanning the entire country aren’t happening simply because utility services have gotten that much more expensive or customers have been receiving better service.

It’s because they’ve bought off the system that’s supposed to keep them in check.  

This is a matter of greed, plain and simple. As a result, utility CEOs are raking it in: The 10 highest-paid utility company executives, whose companies collectively serve nearly 60 million people, each made about $22 million on average last year.

It’s a vicious cycle. Private utilities demand ever-higher rate increases from commissions that are in their pockets. These rate increases inflate their profits, which they then use to lobby the commissions, bankroll politicians and regulators, and fight against any initiatives at the ballot box that would curb their power.

All this at a time when millions of Americans are struggling to pay their bills.

We need to end this vicious cycle and rein in these politically powerful corporations that are ripping us off. Here’s how.

At the federal level, Congress can cap utility profits and bar private utilities from using customers’ money to fund lobbying, political contributions, and fancy private jet trips for executives. One piece of legislation, the Lowering Utility Bills Act, is estimated to save every American household an average of $500 a year.

States are working to crack down, too. Since 2023, at least 22 states have introduced or passed bills that bar utilities from using customer payments to fund political activities. Connecticut’s law has saved customers an estimated $10 million since it was passed in 2023.

States can also rein in private utilities’ excessive profits. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has proposed limiting the reasons for rate increases and requiring utilities to reveal how much of a rate increase will go to investors instead of better service.

The ultimate solution is getting rid of private utilities altogether and putting utilities under public ownership. Publicly owned utilities are beholden to you, the taxpayer — not Wall Street investors. They’re run just like public schools, or libraries, or any other local public agency, and are overseen by local officials. Publicly-owned utilities serve 55 million people, who are reaping the benefits. Rates are typically lower and outages are both less frequent and shorter.

The good news is you can organize with your neighbors to bring your private utility into public ownership. More than a dozen communities are fighting to do so right now, from Clearwater, Florida to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

And if your public utility commissioners are elected, you can work to elect commissioners who will answer to customers, not utility interests.

Private utilities have shown time and time again that they operate like any other private corporation with too much market power: fleecing customers to line their own pockets while bankrolling the politicians that are supposed to keep them in check.

It’s time to cut out the greedy middleman and put this public good where it belongs: in the hands of the public.    

AMERICA — I’VE GOT BREAKING NEWS, MORE STORMS ARE HEADING OUR WAY. FLOODS, TORNADOES, HURRICANES — EVEN WILDFIRES.

AND THEY’RE ONLY GETTING WORSE. 

Are we prepared? 

Well, thanks to Trump we are drastically underprepared and everyone should know how much more at risk we are.

First, Trump has undermined our ability to predict severe weather in the first place.

Trump and DOGE fired hundreds of National Weather Service staff — including hurricane scientists and workers who repair weather forecasting equipment. They cut so many employees that the agency is desperately scrambling to hire some of them back. 

These cuts have already led to fewer weather balloon launches, which help meteorologists collect data that can alert the public to tornadoes and thunderstorms. 

Now why would they do that? Is the theory “If we can’t see it, it must not be happening?”

Second, Trump has gutted our ability to respond after disaster strikes. 

Americans rely on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to coordinate disaster response and to rebuild after disasters. But Trump and DOGE gutted nearly 20% of the agency’s workforce, while leaving multiple top agency jobs vacant or filled by Homeland Security officials with no disaster experience.

This has already been felt on the ground. 

When deadly floods hit Texas in 2025, FEMA's new contract review policy (meant to root out supposed “waste”) reportedly delayed rescue efforts by 72 hours and left thousands of emergency calls unanswered. More recently, Midwest search-and-rescue crews lost access to key tornado-tracking software after FEMA failed to renew a critical contract.

And check out this chart — Trump has even politicized disaster relief. 

If you live in a so-called “Blue State,” Trump is more likely to deny your state’s disaster funding request altogether. And if he does approve, it’s taken him TWICE as long to do it compared to Biden.

Finally, Trump is making it harder for us to reduce the impact of future disasters. 

Trump’s FEMA canceled billions of dollars that helped communities protect against extreme weather. Constructing levees and elevating homes and hospitals in flood zones. Now some funding has been restored — but only a fraction of what Trump snatched away.

Folks, our government is supposed to be there for us. Especially when we’re at our most vulnerable. 

But Trump has unleashed a perfect storm that’s heading your way.  

Please, share this video — and urge your members of Congress to restore disaster funding and our government agencies before it’s too late.

Welcome to another episode of WORLD’S WORST BILLIONAIRE!

Who will take the crown today?

Could it be Elon Musk — for buying an election, dismantling the government with DOGE, and spreading anti-immigrant racism around the globe?

Sadly, no. He’s disqualified, because he is a trillionaire.

What about Mark Zuckerberg, for sowing division with his Meta platforms? 

Or perhaps the Ellison Family, for turning news outlets into propaganda machines? 

Or maybe Peter Thiel, for hating democracy?

Today’s winner is…

Amazon founder, executive board chair, and biggest shareholder, Jeffrey Preston Bezos!

Here are four things that make Jeff Bezos the worst of today’s billionaires.

NUMBER 1: Bezos is ripping you off. 

Antitrust authorities in Washington D.C. and many states have repeatedly found evidence of Bezos’s Amazon punishing sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like Walmart or Target. 

According to a recent lawsuit by the California Attorney General, when Amazon spots a competitor’s lower price, it apparently tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices — or else have their products buried on Amazon.

Third-party sellers on the marketplace also reported being charged excessive fees and getting strongarmed by Amazon into using its shipping services, even if it can find a better deal elsewhere. 

Amazon had allegedly been able to exert this pressure because of its massive market power — leading to higher prices for you.

NUMBER 2: Bezos bends the knee to Trump.

What also distinguishes Bezos among today’s other billionaires is his pathetic sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.

Bezos made headlines for cheering Trump on at his inauguration, while Amazon helped fund it with a million dollar donation.

Then Bezos’s Amazon shelled out $75 million dollar for the box-office bomb Melania, with at least $28 million dollars going to Melania herself. Amazon is reportedly even looking into a reboot of The Apprentice — with Don Jr as host! 

And when Trump announced he was seeking corporate donors for his gilded White House ballroom, Amazon of course chipped in. 

Then there’s what Bezos has done to the legendary Washington Post. 

He bought it in 2013 and has turned it into a Trump media suck-up — blocking its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and limiting how it can cover American capitalism or Trump. 

In 2026, Bezos’ Washington Post fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff.

As Trump’s chaos, corruption, and tyranny have engulfed the nation, Bezos has so far defended Trump’s second term:

All of this bribery and flattery has helped Bezos get favors from Trump’s regime, like the dismissal of labor and antitrust investigations into Amazon, meanwhile…

NUMBER 3: Bezos benefits from corporate welfare out of your pocket.

Bezos’s corporations get some of the biggest tax breaks, subsidies, and government contracts. 

That includes nearly $65 million dollars since 2025 for Amazon’s AWS cloud computing technology, which helps fuel ICE and Border Patrol’s deportation machine. 

It also includes billions of dollars for Bezos’s aerospace corporation Blue Origin and more than $17 billion dollars in tax subsidies for Amazon in 2025 alone. 

Are taxpayers benefitting from all this “investment”? Are good jobs being created? Debatable. 

In 2018, Amazon announced it would build its second headquarters. Then came a national bidding war in which cities and states promised huge tax breaks and subsidies to win over Amazon, who in turn promised tens of thousands of jobs. 

Virginia won the sweepstakes, in part, because it agreed to pony up $750 million dollars in taxpayer funds towards the development of Amazon’s second headquarters. 

Yet Amazon, which promised to create 25,000 new jobs in Virginia by 2038, is wildly behind its pledge. In 2025, its second headquarters actually CUT jobs. 

The same can be said of Amazon overall, which has announced 30,000 job cuts since October 2025 as it invests heavily in AI. And speaking of jobs….

NUMBER 4: Bezos is shafting workers.

Amazon workers are among the worst-treated in America. Roughly half of Amazon’s warehouse workers struggle with housing costs and putting food on the table. 

They also have an injury rate that is 30 percent higher than the industry average.

In April, 2026, an Amazon worker apparently collapsed on the floor of an Oregon warehouse. 

When a co-worker tried to do CPR, a manager told them to get back to work. Amazon disputes this. 

But for more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to keep working as their coworker lay on the floor. The man, aged 46, died. 

One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look.” Sickening, but sadly unsurprising.

Meanwhile, Amazon spends a fortune on union busting to stop its workers from organizing for better pay and working conditions. It spent over $26 million dollars on anti-union consultants in 2025 alone, the highest figure ever reported by a corporation in a single year. 

Folks, Jeff Bezos isn’t one of our era’s worst billionaires simply because he's super rich.

It’s because he uses his immense wealth to wield an indescribable amount of power — over our politics, our economy, and our lives. 

So what can we do?

Boycott Amazon and cancel your Prime subscription. 

Tax billionaires like Bezos, break up monopolies like Amazon, and get Big Money out of politics.

And share this video.

Amazon’s internal slogan is: “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” Its employees are not having fun, and they’re working harder than ever.

It’s time for all of us to turn the obscene level of wealth and power that Bezos has achieved… into history.

Are you ready for this? I mean, this is totally amazing.

The wealth of the richest Americans has exploded. I’m not even talking about the top 1%.I’m talking about the richest 0.1%.

In the 1990s, most Americans’ wealth grew at about the same pace. But look at what happened after 2010. The top 0.1% pulled ahead of the rest of the 1%, and everyone else.

2010. Remember that year!

Now see what happens after 2018, in part because of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich that went into effect at the start of that year. America’s richest 0.1%, are now worth more than the entire GDP of China.

What do they do with that money? Well, when they’re not just shooting rockets into space or building hideous trucks.

Billionaire political spending in presidential elections is also exploding. See what happens after the 2010 Citizens United ruling?

2010… remember that year?

And it keeps getting worse. In the last presidential election, just 300 billionaire families spent roughly $3 billion. Those families gave an average of $10 million each — roughly 100,000 times what an average donor gave.

And the super-rich are getting a big return on their “investment.” They’re getting more tax cuts, deregulation, and a government that lets them get away with busting unions, exploiting workers, and monopolizing their markets while poisoning the environment…

All so they can get even richer and accumulate even more power…so they can get even richer and…well, you get it.

But this vicious cycle is unsustainable, both politically and economically. When so much of our economy is in relatively few hands, we will inevitably get to the point where consumers cannot buy all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. This puts the entire economy at risk.

It’s also politically unstable because it is inherently divisive — pitting losers against winners and laying the groundwork for an authoritarian state — where no one’s future is secure, including the super-rich.

So we ALL have a stake in stopping this vicious cycle.

To do this we NEED to raise taxes on the rich, not to “punish them” but to ensure that the system works for everyone. This means raising their income taxes and taxing their wealth.

And we can establish public financing for federal elections — matching public dollars to small dollar donations in order to balance the power of super-rich and corporate donors. Many states and cities are already doing this — and it works. 

Finally, we’ve got to undo Citizens United. One way to do that is for states to follow what Montana hopes to do — take away the power of corporations to make political contributions in the first place. 

Look, it’s time to get big money out of politics — for all our sakes.