Jeff Bezos Says the Bottom 50% Should Pay No Income Taxes

Andrew Ross Sorkin. CNBC. Mid-May 2026.

The number he used: the lower half of earners send in about 3 percent of federal income-tax receipts. He wants that cell to read zero. “I don’t want to reduce it, I want to eliminate it. Zero is a better number than $1.” Nurse in Queens, $50k–$75k Amazon-warehouse example, apology from Washington instead of a 1040. People doing well, people struggling. If you want progressive, start by not taxing her. Maybe she is the next Jobs if the bill disappears. He said he would lobby Trump for it.

Tax Foundation snapshot he was swimming in: 2023 average federal income-tax rate about 14 percent overall; top 1 percent around 26 percent on that tax; bottom half around 3.7 percent, with average gross in that half near $24,500. Top 1 percent pay roughly 40 percent of federal income-tax dollars. Those are income-tax columns. They are not the whole receipt.

The other side of the argument, which Mother Jones and the Saez-Zucman school put in the same week: add payroll, state income, sales, excise, and the effective rate across classes lands closer together — mid-20s — and billionaires can look cheaper than a nurse once unrealized gains and entity-level structures sit outside AGI. Bezos paid $0 federal income tax in at least one famous early-2010s year and took a child credit. Amazon’s wage floor and his $279 billion Bloomberg print are why the quote landed like a punchline to half the timeline.

Both frames can be true at once. Federal income tax is already a rich-person tax in the aggregate. Working people still meet FICA every payday and sales tax every grocery run. Zeroing the 1040 for the bottom half is cheap for the Treasury relative to the budget and expensive as a slogan if it is sold as “the poor pay nothing.” They do not, if you count the other lines.

No Congress attached a score to this interview. No rate schedule moved. A founder said the bottom 50 percent’s income-tax cell should be empty and that empty is a better psychology than $1. That is the article. The rest is whose spreadsheet you trust when “tax” means one form or every form.