Applying the Five Whys to Inequality

Alright, welcome back to Gary's Economics. Today we are going to explain why Jeff Bezos wants to cut your taxes . Interesting one this week. We're gonna go over to the US, our surprisingly tall little brother, which is a country I've not looked at too much recently. For a bit of context, the Tax the Super Rich movement has been growing a lot in basically how much public attention it's been receiving in the US for a couple of reasons. Number one, they have a big vote on a uh tax on the soup rich in California coming up in November. And number two, uh Zoran Mamdani has become mayor of New York and he's aggressively trying to tax the rich, including bringing in a tax on unoccupied second homes in New York City. And this has really brought a lot of spotlight to the idea of tax the rich in the US. There's going to be a vote in November, and a lot of people, uh, including the American very rich, uh, are not happy about it. And Jeff Bezos, who is the world's fourth richest man with a wealth of approximately about $280 billion , uh, did an interview for CNBC this week, where he kind of argued that we shouldn't tax the rich. It's been talked about a lot in the press, especially over in the U S. It's a really good opportunity for us to look at what Jeff Bezos is saying, understand why he is saying it, and basically understand like where we are at the moment in the kind of global fight against inequality for a fairer tax system, for fairer taxation of the super-rich, what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are , how How it's being attacked and basically how we need to be smart and what we need to understand in order to get that fair attack system that we need. Okay, so let's jump straight into the interview. Now, the the headline moment was Jeff Bezos arguing that people on average salaries should pay less tax? Yeah, uh you know, I started thinking about this and doing some research. A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays twelve more than $12,000 a year in taxes . Does that really make sense? So people talk about you know making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse and queens not pay taxes? Why is somebody at all? Why is some why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than a thousand dollars a month in taxes that's a thousand dollars a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything okay so at the first glimpse this might seem interesting. Uh, why do we have a billionaire arguing for ordinary people to pay lower taxes? You know, these are at the current at the moment we have a tax system where billionaires pay very low taxes, almost nothing, and ordinary people pay, if you add a port of their taxes, you know, close to 50%. Um so it's a great tax system, uh balance in favor of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires. But he's saying ordinary people should pay less tax. Okay. Interesting, perhaps, surprising . Why is he saying that? Uh really the answer is very very simple. In order to know that we just simply need to see the question that he was answering. So here is the question that Jeff Bezos was asked , and his response was cut taxes on uh teachers. But one of the topics that I thought we should talk about and maybe even start with, yeah, is these days it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America, uh, about the billionaire class, um, about wealth inequality and policy and everything else. Uh, and it's taken a a uniquely critical turn I think and I'm so curious before we even get into everything else what you think about that right now okay so the question was uh is quite delivered in quite a roundabout way by CNBC. Basically, everybody's talking about taxing the super rich. You are super rich. What do you think about it? And that is the question in response to which Jeff Bezos eventually got around to saying I think that ordinary teachers should pay less tax . Now, if we first analyze this uh from an economic perspective, at a surface level, this is like quite a like strange argument, right? Because just that it's most basic, you so Jeff Bezos has very intentionally picked a salary level, $75,000 a year, which is quite close to the American average. You, the average man or woman paying less taxes, is just quite obviously not a substitute for billionaires paying more taxes, right? Like if we're in a situation where government needs more tax money, and uh Jeff Bezos says, how about instead of that we we charge ordinary workers less tax money, that doesn't solve the problem of tax money, right? This is a bit like you and I go to a restaurant and uh you know that I'm like loaded because you've uh been reading the Daily Mail and you are like struggling for money and you say at the end of the meal hey listen you know how about maybe you know you cover this one, um, and I say, listen, forget about that. I've got a better idea, I'm not gonna pay for it, but how about you don't pay for it? Like this is it, it it's it doesn't really um especially in the UK context where um you know government finances are quite stretched, but increasingly US finances are quite stretched as well. The US has a large and and a large deficit and a large and rapidly growing debt and borrowing costs in the US are rising like they are here. Um it it doesn't it's a strange argument, right? It's it's a strange argument to say, okay, well, tax money is needed, so instead of me paying more, how about you pay less? And it would be easy. And before I r made this video, I watched a lot of there's been a lot of US media about this and a lot of people kind of like sh on Jeff Bezos a little bit. But I think it would be easy to dismiss this as like, well, this is like a dumb argument, especially if you're viewing it from the UK perspective. Because we had just a few years ago, we had a Prime Minister Liz Trust who basically came in like with this tax strategy. Of what we're gonna do is we're gonna cut tax on billionaires and we're gonna use that to cut tax on working people and what happened is like it basically immediately it caused like an enormous economic crisis. This is not uh a fully fleshed out um economic argument but I think it's a bit rash to immediately disregard it because I think to a degree it is an intelligent argument from a kind of like a rhetorical, like a persuasive perspective for like a very simple reason, right? So Jeff Bezos, when he made this argument, he used a lot of numbers. And numbers catch people's attention, especially when they are amounts of money and Jeff Bezos he hits this number 75,000 dollars um a a teacher in Queens and 75,000 which is a little bit above the American average which means 75,000 will be quite close to the salary of of a lot Americans who watch this video. And as soon as they hear that, they'll be like, Oh, that's somebody similar to me, similar financial situation to me. And then he says, We didn't show this in the clip, but he says, you know, they're paying twelve thousand dollars a year taxes. That's like one thousand dollars um a month in taxes, and they could use that money to pay their bills or or to pay their rent or you know to take care of their family. And what he's doing there is he's using the persuasive power of money. And he's saying, well, listen, if you come with me, you can get this $1,000 a month. And wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be great if you if you could have $1,000 a month? And he's contrasting that to what what seems to many people to be a kind of abstract concept. Like and and he's trying to make it seems like you have this like dichotomy, like you have this choice. You have you have two things you can choose from. You can either choose more taxes for me, Jeff Bezos, and he says specifically in this interview, that's not gonna that doesn't solve anything, you know, that's not gonna help you, or what we could have is less tax for you, one thousand dollars every single month in your pocket, and obviously, I as I've said, like you don't need to dig far into it before you realize like this is you know this is not just not taxing anyone is is not a really at all a feasible economic strategy but you know we live in a world where people for better or worse are a little bit obsessed with money. We live in a society which is obsessed with money. We live in an economy where a lot of people are struggling for money. And if this guy turns around and says, look, these guys are trying to tax me but we have an alternative which is to give every single one of you one thousand dollars a month it's gonna be like potentially quite persuasive right and when I saw it like it shouldn't be funny because it's like a really serious issue, and you know my whole channel is about this. But it is quite what what made me laugh about this is it immediately reminded me of like this is how you distract like a child or a baby who is doing something that you don't like. You say to them, hey, look, look, do you want to use an iPad? Do you want to get some ice cream? You know, you just you just switch you just switch the conversation immediately away from something you don't want the child to do, don't tax me. And he said, Oh, but you know, if you do what I want, I'll give you a thousand dollars a month. You know, and and of course Jeff Bezos knows like he's probably not gonna get this policy that that he's he's demanding . But it doesn't matter because all he's trying to do is just distract you away from the thing that he doesn't want you to talk about by giving you this like alluring thing here. Like a thousand, he doesn't want a thousand dollars a month, like that would be like fantasti c, basically. Um , and it takes advantage of like a lack of basically economics understanding. Um, and I think this is the reason why I try so hard to like create a public that just has a basic understanding of basic economic ideas. Um, you know, I've done videos in the last couple of years. I did one saying like forget about money. And the big idea for the forget about money video was forget about money because money's confusing. Um, and you know, the government can print money and it can do a lot of things, but what the government can't print is resources. And any given amount of time, there's a certain amount of resources. There's a certain amount of housing, a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of raw materials, a certain amount of transport, a certain number of cars, and these will be distributed in a certain way. And when you understand that, you realize that this idea that Jeff Bezos is suggesting, how about you let me keep my money and then I will give you more money is, like kind of like a nonsense. We can't just like suddenly create more money, Jeff Bezos gets more money and you get more money. But I think it will appeal to some people it's taken advantage of like a lack of economic understanding, this idea that like there's um there's an American movie from a few years ago called Idiocracy, which I actually tried to watch and I I didn't think it was actually a great movie, but there's a great scene where you know there's a guy's running to be president and he says well what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna give everybody more money and he takes that sort of like machine gun he starts like firing money into the audience because of course we can print out money but at the end of the day there is competition for real resources. We exist in economies where billionaires pay very low rates of tax. Jeff Bezos himself has paid, if you look at his life, he's worth about $280 billion dollars. He's paid, I think, something like $8 billion of tax, which means on his lifetime income, he's paid something like 3% on his whole lifetime income. You're paying 50%. His class is getting aggressively richer, your class is getting aggressively poorer. You don't know these things, and he's saying, Listen, come with me, I'll get richer, and you'll get richer. And what this plays on is basically the fact that we all hate tax , we all hate politicians, we all hate the media , and we're looking for somebody else who who's gonna save us, right? And I think this reminds me very much of basically what what Elon Musk does and what Donald Trump does, where they portray themselves as I'm not a politician, I'm a businessman, I know how to make money, come with me, I'll get rich, I'll make you rich. And I think it would be too much to simply dismiss this, right? You know, these guys, what they're trying to do is portray themselves as the sensible guys in the room, um, the guys who are smarter than the politicians and really they're kind of fishing you know this is like one thousand dollars on the end of a hook and they're hoping that you will bite that and you will accept a system which is aggressively impover ishing you. So when I see this, what it tells me is that obviously here in the UK , the voice of the wealth tax movement is is is me and I run I am you know a financial trader and I run essentially this economics educational channel and everything I do is about educating the public that if you don't want to get poorer , you have to tax the rich. But in other countries like the US, where I'm not such a well-known voice, a lot of the argument has been about fairness, has been about justice, and it is vulnerable to basically somebody who is a billionaire coming in and saying, No, ignore that . These guys are not talking about how to make you rich. I will make you rich. Um , so I think the next thing you should recognise when you see this argument of let's not tax uh me more, let's tax working people less, is I think it highlights a little bit the stupidity in a way of the way we discuss tax in the media, which is we talk about we should tax these people more, these people less, and sometimes we talk about spending, we should do more of this spending or we should do less of that spending without realizing that these things have to be funded essentially, and people are only really able to come out with these sort of ridiculous suggestions, like let's just tax everybody less, because we don't connect the tax side and the spending side. Um, and you know, obviously there is also the option of borrowing more but or even printing money but if whenever you say we should cut taxes you need to be clear okay where is that gonna come from where is the money gonna come from basically in whichever way and this is why from a couple of years ago now we've really been pushing the like the tax wealth not work message because even in this country I think that from very very early on because people don't really understand the difference between like a billionaire and which is a billion is just an insane amount of money, it's like it's really not in any way realistically attainable to an ordinary person. Whereas a million is still maybe something you could get if you manage to get a good job or if you inherit a house from your parents. They use this confusion between a billionaire and a millionaire, such that when somebody like me or somebody like Gabriel Zuckman or somebody like Zoran Mamdani or Zach Balanski says increase tax on the very rich, they want you to think we're trying to tax you. And it's this classic bait and switch that when I say tax the super rich more, they say watch out for Gary, he's trying to tax you more. And that is why I've been really aggressively focusing on this like tax wealth, not work message. Now tax wealth not work is, you know, although it's extremely concisely summarised, it is a coherent economic message because we take some money from this group and we give that money to this group and it's like balanced from a government perspective. What Jeff Bezos is suggesting, which is tax me less and tax you less, it raises the obvious question of like where does that money come from? I mean what Jeff Bezos actually said was, should we tax you more? And he's like, don't talk about that. Let's tax the viewer less. And he's doing this thing which I often do in my interviews, which is when I'm being interviewed by someone who is maybe a bit of a dickhead, which happens sometimes, rather than debate the interviewer, who is often debating me in bad faith, jump over the interviewer, go to the audience and say, listen, I'm the one who is on your side basically. And Jeff Bezos is doing this. But it has the obvious weakness of where does the money come from? And the interviewer picks up and says, Okay, well you want to tax ordinary people less. How about we fund that by taxing you more? Should you be paying higher taxes to pay for the three percent component part of this that you think is gonna need need to be paid for, if not more than that, given the debts we have? It's certainly uh perfectly valid policy debate to say do we want an even more progressive tax system? So, you know, the kind of the line that gets uh quoted all the time is, you know, uh you the wealthy should pay their fair share. Right. And we can argue about what the fair share is. That's a policy debate. That's okay. We actually have a spending problem. And it and that's a skills issue. I mean let me give you an example. The New York City school system. Right. They spend forty-four thousand dollars per stud ent . Forty-four thousand. That's 30% more per student than other big cities like Chicago, LA, and Boston. If we ran Amazon, the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive, we'd have to charge you a hundred dollar delivery fee, and then when the package did finally arrive, it'd have the wrong item in it anyway. So this is Jeff Bezos' next argument, which is it's kind of the the shallowness of his first argument, which is like, hey, let's just not tax anyone, is exposed pretty quickly. Um that it that was I don't think you'll find any economists that say like this is like really feasible. Just don't tax anyone. Um you'll struggle to find that working anywhere. So if you want to cut tax on workers, which is what Jeff Bezos is really pushing, maybe we should tax you more uh you the you jeff bezos and then jeff bezos again throws the ball away it's another distraction which is like no actually the real problem is a spending problem. And he uses this term, which he uses, I think he uses it seven times in the whole interview, which is skills. He says it's um it's a skills issue And now he's moved the argument on Which is, at least in theory, more economically feasible. So his first argument is, okay, should we tax you more? And he's like , how about we tax working people less. And that's nice. It's bait for working people because working people want to pay less tax. But like it really is not economically complete because we can't just start taxing everybody lessess unl we want to do austerity. Um and in countries like the UK where we've seen austerity that's been incredibly painful. So then he said, okay, okay, we can tax working people less without taxing you more by cutting government spending and he kind of floats this idea that government spending at the moment is is wasteful, it's it's inefficient. Um I'm really interested in his repeated use of this term skills issue, which I'll get into a little bit more later . And once again, what you have is an argument which on the surface is appealing. And the reason that it's appealing is because everyone hates government. Um, it's becoming more and more widely like accepted in public opinion that politicians are like dickheads and that governments are wasteful. So like yeah, like you know of course like we want to reduce government waste and we want to increase government inefficiency and we want to improve government skills. So like yeah, like great argument, Jeff Bezos. Like like who's gonna disagree with you? And um I think this this in itself is the weakness of the argument. You know, if you sugg est that the way to fix something is to do something which absolutely everybody in the country wants to do, then you're probably not offering anything particularly of value, right? Like I think you know the population of the UK, 606 six million, you'd struggle to find you know 50 people who don't think we should reduce government waste and who don't think we should increase government efficiency and who don't think we should increase government skills. Yeah, and it's the same in the US. Like every single politician ever has come in saying we're going to fix this problem by decreasing government waste and improving government efficiency. So if that was a thing that you could quite simply just do given that absolutely everybody in the whole world wants to do it we would have already done it by now right and it it's it's meaningless but it 's popul ar. So once again, what you see here is Jeff Bezos Using, kind of like weaponizing, I guess, in a way, like a lack of broad economic understanding in the public. So in the first case he offer something which is like not really possible, which is like how about nobody pays tax? And then and then everybody will be rich. Which is great because everybody hates tax. And then he says, Well, how about we just like make the government efficient? Because the government is like rubbish. And and I'm Jeff Bezos and I will give my skills to the government. And this is popular because government is like really, really hated. Um and what he's trying to do here is basically set up an alternative like boogeyman um to himself and the billionaires, which is government is shit, taxes shit. And this is like in many ways like a good persuasive argument because the bogeyman you are creating is somebody who is already hated. Everybody hates government and everybody hates taxes. And it's quite funny because another thing, which Jeff Bezos says early in the interview, is um Politicians are they're using this age-old technique of, you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers at but the problem is that doesn't solve anything. So it's in business is asked early on in the interview, you know, should rich people pay tax? And he basically says, you know, these guys are pointing the fingers at me and the billionaires and it's saying my fault, it's my fault, but look, pointing fingers doesn't solve anything. Um basically what you need to do is like replace the government because the government are are rubbish and you should get rid of taxes because taxes are rubbish um which is which is pointing the fingers in in a way that doesn't solve anything because the two things which you have suggested are one thing which is impossible which, is the cut tax es on everybody without reducing government services. And another thing which absolutely everybody ever has agreed with and tried to do and failed, which is to reduce government inefficiency. You know, if I step back and I look at what has happened on the whatever you want to call it, the tax the rich movement or the you know the anti-inequality movement or the wealth tax movement in the last like two years, five years, ten years. Um like if you'd have told me ten years ago, five years ago, or two years ago, we would be where we are now, where this issue is like constantly one of the big issues in politics when it when the economy is discussed, uh, where like billionaires like Jeff Bezos would feel like they have to apply on it. Where we're getting wealth taxes all over the world, even in countries which have right-wing governments. I I wouldn't have believed you. But I think the one thing which I've been trying to provide, which we don't have enough of in other wealth tax movements around the world, is this clear, simple economic message, which is the reason your living standards are falling, is because of growing inequality. And I think that is made clear by Jeff Bezos saying exactly that in this interview: that taxing me doesn't solve anything, it's not gonna help that that that nurse in in Queens. We need to make the case that it does. We need to make the case that it will. Um, and really like the whole story of the history of this channel is me sort of every week trying to make that case um in a different way. I think if you if you want like one simple video that you need to watch on this channel to understand like why growing inequality is what is hitting living standards. I would recommend watching the video from last year called The Squeeze Out, which basically explains that you know once you stop taxing rich people at high rates, which we did in the 80s, they start to generate an enormous amount of income, they start to buy up the assets, they get richer, asset prices go up more and more, ordinary people can't afford to buy assets anymore, and eventually you see wealth , ownership, the ability to own, squeezed out of the working class and squeezed out of governments. And then obviously people have nothing left and they start to see their living standards fall. I think that is the best video we've made that explains the economic case. I mean I mean and Jeff Bezos himself is an excellent example, right? So Jeff Bezos is, if uh Google can be trusted, worth about $280 million Billion . Sorry, yeah, thanks. Jeff Bezos I've made the mistake myself there. Jeff Bezos is worth $280 billion , which means that if he makes uh five percent a year, which um he'll almost certainly make significantly more than that, he's going to make $14 billion a year, which is something like one billion dollars every four weeks. So he's making you know $250 million a week. So he's making like $30 or $40 million a day. Really, if you want to understand why having untaxed billionaires hurt your living standards. You don't really need to understand anything more than that. Once you have a class of people making 30 or 40 million dollars a day, imagine you are making 40 million dollars a day . How much would you spend? You know, I couldn't even imagine spending like a hundred thousand dollars a day. Okay, so yeah, let's assume you spend a hundred thousand dollars a day, um you know, and then you've got another you've still got another you know twenty-eight million dollars still you know to spend you have no choice but to slowly buy all of the assets in the entire world. You know, that that is that is what is gonna happen and that is exactly what is happening. And then what that means is other groups of society will lose their ownership of assets and we will eventually end up in the kind of extremely unequal world that we have been in. So that this is the the point that I want you to understand as much as you can. The growing wealth of the billionaire class is the reason that you are getting poorer. This is the reason you can't afford a house. It's the reason your government wealth is collapsing. You know, these two things are the same thing. You cannot have one tiny minority of people that own everything and not have everybody else owning nothing. Um, so I think this, you know, a lot of people have been shitting on Bezos this week, and I think it was kind of I think his intervention was ultimately kind of dumb, and I think it will be self-defeating, but he's highlighted one really important thing. We need to as much as possible clarify, simplify, make clear the economic reasons why allowing the billionaires to be untaxed and to own everything will and is making ordinary people poorer. And I want to finish on one last bit of sort of um business jargon which Jeff Bezos taught me. So what did he say after he said, you know, Amazon could fix this . If we have a problem at Amazon, you know, the way we would fix it is we would go in and we'd do the five whys and we'd try to get to a root cause, we try to find a root fix, and then when we fix it at the root, you're fixing it fragment So do you did you know what the five wires are? The five wires? I didn't look it up. The five wires is basically this idea, you have a problem. And um I find it interesting as well. Basically, you just keep asking why, why, wh y, uh until you find the reason, which is um once again exactly like what kids do. Um Jeff Bezos a lot of similarities to a young child it seems. Um So let's get into this, alright? Let's get into this five whys . Why can't you afford to buy a house? You know, what is the reason? You know, why is that happening? The answer to that, I think, is because you are increasingly competing with a class of unbelievably rich people who are making $30 million every single day for the ownership of the assets in the world. You know, if you look at the countries and the places in history where housing is affordable, they are countries that do not have incredibly wealthy billionaire classes, you know, like Europe in the period after the World War II. And if you look at the countries where housing is unaffordable, like like now, these are places where you have these super wealthy billionaires. Um they're buying everything. Of course, they're buying everything. It's not just housing that's getting expensive. Assets in general are becoming expensive because you're competing with billionaires. Okay, but the five whys okay, we keep asking. Okay, well why? Why do we have um a super super wealthy billionaire class now when we didn't have that in the fifties and the 60s and the 70s and the 80 ands the 90s when housing was um much more affordable. Well, the answer is quite simply because in the 80s we stopped taxing billionaires, effectively. Uh, we used to have very high rates of tax in the golden age of capitalism after World War II, we had incredibly high rates of tax on the rich. In this country, I think we had 95% top income tax, 90% top inherent inherent inheritance tax on the very rich. And what that meant was rich people like Jeff Bezos were not able to do this thing where you have an enormous amount of income and you just reinvest it and reinvest it and reinvest it and you get compound interest and it grows exponentially and eventually I own the whole f<unk>ing world. Okay, so why did that happen? Why did we stop taxing um the super rich in the 80s? The answer was because uh we lost an argument about tax and and inequality and and distribution. And people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan managed to convince the public that not taxing billionaires would be good for them. And why did that hap pen? Because quite simply we forgot the thing which you know our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents understood, which was that distribution and inequality matters. You know, it's as simple as that. And I've said it time and time again. No, if we have an intelligent, educated public that understand one simple thing, which is that if you allow inequality to grow rapid ly, it will hurt living standards, then we will be 70, 80, 90 percent towards winning this battle. And I think that that is where we need to be. Um whether you're here in the UK or in the US giving all your money to Def Bezos or in Germany or in Australia or in France or in Italy or Spain or any of these countries, we need to be in a situation where if you go outside and pull your average man or woman off the street and say why are living standards falling, the answer that the majority of them give you is because inequality is rising. Once we get to that situation , then we will be able to fix this problem. That is your answer to Jeff Bezos' five whys. And the truth is , and I almost don't believe myself saying this, um, we're getting there. We're getting there. We're getting there all around the world. Um, you know, here in the UK and I'll talk about this more next week. We're gonna get a new Prime Minister. Uh it could be as soon as the next couple of months. Um it might it might take a year, but when that new prime minister comes in, they will really really really really struggle to win the confidence of the public unless they deliver something on inequality. And the reason for that is quite simply because the British public understands now that if you don't act on inequality, their living standards will fall. And I've been all across the world, you know, in the last year or so. I've been obviously Australia, New Zealand, we had Gabriel Zuckman here from France last week. You know, but I've been to Italy and Portugal and Sweden and Norway, and people are starting to understand this all over the world. And we are reaching a situation where when even a even a right-wing government, you know, comes in in Hungary, they have no choice but to take action inequality. And you know, I think it's amazing the progress that we've made. But the fact that Bezos feels that he can come out on TV and say taxi me is not gonna help you, shows that we have more distance to go. We need to make that clear message for the public to understand. Of course it affects us. Of course it affects us. If we allow a class like you to own everything, then we will go back to where we were in Europe 300, 400, 500 years ago, where the whole fing world is owned by like 20 guys and the rest of us live in desperate poverty. You know, th this is part of the foundation of America, this idea that you cannot have, you know, this all of the wealth owned by a few people. But also , when I see Jeff Bezos come out, it gives me hope , to be honest. Because you know, when I first started working on inequalities, 20 11 is when I first started working on it. Nobody was interested in this. And we we''veve been been pus pushinghing it, it, you know, people like me and Gabriel Zuckman, but also the guys, you know, so many different people all across the world that have done great work on this. It reaches the point now where the fourth richest man on the world, you know, feels like he needs to go on f<unk>ing YouTube and chat a load of bullshit to fight people like us, um, to fight people like you. Stop you from getting your fair share of the pie. And there's this famous quote which is probably not real quote which is first they ignore you then they laugh at you then they fight you then you win and I've been doing this work for 15 years now and the truth is I was ignored for probably about 12 and a half of those years. And you know, even if you look at you know, I mention it so often, but when when Zach Polansky went on the rest of politics and they pointed him and laughed at him essentially and said, What are you talking about? You're an idiot, there's no economists, you know. And then we go and pull out seven Nobel Prize winning economists, you know, and Gabriel Zuckman from France and say, listen, you know, we've got them, we've got the economists. We're winning. Jeff Bezos is a very wealthy man and he's not gonna waste his time and his money, buying newspapers and coming out on TV, and arguing he shouldn't be taxed. Unless we were winning. You know, we forced them into this. And when I see these guys coming out and and, you know, putting themselves on the front l ines kind of stupidly, to be honest. Um, Jeff Bezos trying to make himself like the voice on uh opposing wealth taxes, I think is kind of stupid. But it shows them that we've got them backed into a corner here. Um and, I didn't believe this for years and years and years and years and years. But the fact is, I do think we're gonna win. I do think we're gonna win. But we can't be complacent when Jeff Bezos comes out and makes those arguments, we do need to understand that some people are gonna listen to that. We cannot let the billionaires be the voice of aspiration. Listen, if you look at countruntries where people have been able to go from poverty to being rich. These were not countries which had aggressively growing inequality. If you allow your country to be a country where the poor get poorer every year and the rich get richer every year, that will not be a world where ordinary people like you can get into being financially secure. We need to move away from an economic system where wealth is being drained away from the many and accumulated by the super ri ch and towards an econom ic system where wealth circulates around. But listen, the rich are getting richer, uh they'll buy themselves a lot of newspapers and a lot of media channels and they'll put a lot of um silly videos on the internet. What we need is an educated public that understands one simple message. If we allow inequality to get worse and worse and worse, then you and your kids and your grandkids will be living in povert y. So in answer to Jeff Bezos, it will make a difference. If we tax the super rich, it will make a difference. That is the only way that we can get wealth back in the hands of working people, and that is the only way that you and your kids can be rich. Tax World Not Work. Thank you very much.