[Tax justice activists are pursuing the tax scofflaws. To escape
taxes, it may not be enough for Jeff Bezos to move to Florida. He may
have to move to Mars. ]
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THE SUPER-RICH MOVE TO AVOID TAXES. BUT CAN THEY HIDE?  
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Sam Pizzigati
November 8, 2023
Inequality.org
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_ Tax justice activists are pursuing the tax scofflaws. To escape
taxes, it may not be enough for Jeff Bezos to move to Florida. He may
have to move to Mars. _

corporate-tax-cheats-banner, by janinsanfran (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

Jeff Bezos is moving. The second-richest human being on the face of
the Earth — with a net worth
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some $166 billion — has been calling the Pacific Northwest home for
quite some time. But he’s just announced
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Instagram that he’s decamping Seattle and making Florida his new
home sweet home.

The move, says Bezos, will bring him closer to his parents who now
live in Miami.

“My parents,” adds the mega-billionaire, “have always been my
biggest supporters.”

But the move doesn’t just bring Bezos closer to ma and pa. Bezos has
had plenty of _financial_ motivation to make the move — ever since
Washington state started yanking out its low-tax welcome mat for the
richest among us.

Those rich have flourished for years under a Washington state
constitution that makes an income tax a no-no. Earlier this year, in
March, that gravy train ended when the state’s supreme court
justices okayed an end-run around this no-no. They gave their
blessing
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a 7 percent “excise” tax on capital gains from the sale of stocks,
bonds, and other assets “in excess of $250,000 in a calendar
year.”

Lawmakers in Washington now stand poised to take an even stiffer step
against grand fortune. They’re contemplating a state wealth tax, a
levy that would cost Bezos — if he chose to remain a Washington
state resident — “about 45 percent of the more than $3 billion a
year” the new tax figures to raise, a Tax Foundation
analyst estimates
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Florida, by contrast, has no levy on grand wealth in the works and
nothing in any way close to a state income tax on the books. And Bezos
already owns a place of his own in Florida, a mansion on
an artificial
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island widely known as the “Billionaires Bunker.” He spent $68
million for that manse earlier this year and then, this past October,
spent another $79 million to pick up the place next-door.

Could life possibly get any sweeter for Jeff Bezos and his billions?
Not likely. In fact, those billions are now facing their first
significant squeeze.

A worldwide squeeze. Last month, lawmakers and activists from over 30
nations gathered together in the UK, at the Mechanics’ Institute in
Manchester, the historic birthplace of the British national labor
movement. This first-ever global “Summit to Make Amazon Pay” set
about developing policy solutions — at the municipal, national, and
international levels — for confronting Amazon’s corporate abuses
on everything from the environment and worker rights to tax justice.

That confrontation will intensify later this month. On November 24,
the international retail industry’s “Black Friday” super-sale
day, activists worldwide will be staging strikes and protests
demanding that Amazon start paying for the damage this corporate giant
is doing to worker families, their communities, and our shared planet.

“No company” on that planet today, U.S. senator Bernie Sanders
told the Manchester summit, stands as “a better poster child” for
“corporate greed and arrogance” than Amazon. Sanders made that
observation about the same time Amazon was announcing
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its quarterly profits had nearly tripled over the past year, a surge
that just happened to come while Amazon was laying off
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27,000 workers.

The upcoming international November 24 Black Friday protests will be
spotlighting everything from the glaring need for higher wages
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warehouses to the environmental impact
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Amazon’s ubiquitous delivery trucks.

In Spain, the city of Barcelona earlier this year imposed a new annual
tax on the glut of e-commerce delivery vans congesting local streets.
In Paris, deputy mayor David Belliard has blasted
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for “for making billions by using public space.” Proceeds from the
new tax on e-commerce deliveries he’s suggesting could fund
significant improvements in the city’s public transportation.

We all find ourselves today, Spain’s minister of labor Yolanda
Díaz noted
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her keynote address to last month’s landmark Summit to Make Amazon
Pay, in “a conflict between profits and wages, a conflict over time
and its free use, between the greed of a few and the possibility of a
dignified life for the majority.”

The issues these conflicts raise, Díaz added, extend “much
further” than Amazon, a reality that demands we “explore new ways
to fund an ecologically democratic and fair plan” for moving
forward, a plan that has Amazon and other corporate giants
contributing “genuinely” to the common good.

That plan could, for instance, include the global climate tax on the
world’s wealthiest the French economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas
Chancel proposed
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this year. Their World Inequality Lab proposal would levy a
progressive tax of up to 3 percent a year on the world’s richest
0.001 percent, those deep pockets with fortunes worth at least $100
million.

To avoid a tax like that, Jeff Bezos would have to do more than move
to Florida. He’d have to move to Mars.

SAM PIZZIGATI, AN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES ASSOCIATE FELLOW,
CO-EDITS INEQUALITY.ORG. HIS LATEST BOOKS INCLUDE _THE CASE FOR A
MAXIMUM WAGE_
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RICH DON’T ALWAYS WIN: THE FORGOTTEN TRIUMPH OVER PLUTOCRACY THAT
CREATED THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, 1900-1970_
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* taxes
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* wealth tax
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* economic inequality
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