politics

Steve Kopack, for NBC News: Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to explain why taxing billionaires is a distraction — and accidentally made the case for taxing billionaires.

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” Bezos said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Sure. And you could donate a rounding error from your stock portfolio and fund every teacher in Queens for a decade — but we’re not talking about charity, we’re talking about whether the richest man in the room gets to write the rules.

The rest of the interview is the usual playbook. Income inequality is real, but don’t look at my tax rate. Politicians are “picking a villain.” Mamdani is the foil — the socialist mayor who wants the wealthy to pay more, while Manhattan luxury sales somehow prove the city isn’t dying. None of that answers the question Bezos keeps dodging: if doubling his taxes wouldn’t matter, why is he on television arguing against it?

He also suggested we start by having “the nurse in Queens not pay taxes” — as if that’s the problem. An estimated forty percent of U.S. households owed no federal income tax for 2024. The bottom half averaged fifty-three thousand a year. Bezos is worth two hundred seventy billion. The nurse isn’t the one who needs a tax break.

Mamdani’s reply was one sentence. It was enough.

Océane Herrero, reporting for POLITICO: Silicon Valley is doing what Silicon Valley always does when it smells a regulator — show up early, talk ethics, and call it partnership.

The April 29 gathering was the latest in a series of meetings that, taken together, amount to a quiet lobbying push by the tech industry ahead of Leo’s first encyclical, according to interviews with seven people for this article.

The funny part isn’t that Meta and Amazon are lobbying. Of course they are. The funny part is that they’re lobbying the Vatican because the Vatican still does something almost nobody else in public life can do anymore: write a moral argument meant to outlast the news cycle.

If Leo XIV publishes an encyclical that takes AI seriously and treats “responsible development” as something other than a press release, it will annoy the right people. Which is a decent early signal that it might be worth reading.