Bernie Sanders on taxation: what the evidence says · JRE #1330
“So as you indicated, you have a company like Amazon owned by Jeff Bezos, who happens to be the wealthiest guy in America worth about $150 billion. Amazon paid zero in federal income taxes.”
What the evidence says
Sanders made this claim on JRE #1330, recorded around August 2019. Amazon's own SEC filings showed it owed $0 in federal income tax on U.S. profits in both 2017 and 2018, a year in which it earned $11.2 billion in pre-tax U.S. income and reported a federal tax rebate of roughly $129 million; this was independently confirmed by tax analysts and multiple fact-checking organizations and stemmed from legal use of stock-compensation deductions, R&D credits, and other tax breaks rather than illegal evasion. Amazon began paying federal income tax again starting with the 2019 tax year. The $150 billion net-worth figure for Bezos was accurate as a snapshot -- Bloomberg and Forbes indices put his wealth above $150 billion for stretches of 2018 into mid-2019 -- but such wealth estimates fluctuate with stock price and, in Bezos's case, were reduced by roughly a quarter after his 2019 divorce settlement, so the figure is better read as a rough point-in-time estimate than a fixed or permanent state. Overall, the tax claim is well-supported for the years in question, while the wealth figure is an imprecise but roughly accurate approximation for the period.