Blame Government Overspending For America’s Affordability Crisis
Democrats will spend the midterms trying to equate 'affordability' with more government spending programs. Conservatives should make the opposite case.Democrats will spend the midterms trying to equate 'affordability' with more government spending programs. Conservatives should make the opposite case.VIDEO: Jeff Bezos slaps down socialist schemes and liberal policies in CNBC interview
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ripped into many of the policies on the left in a recent interview that was clipped widely on social media.
Bezos took aim at schemes to raise taxes on the wealthy and advocated lower taxes on Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder. He made the comments from the factory floor of his Blue Origin aerospace company during an interview on "Squawk Box" with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin released Wednesday.
'We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology!'
When pressed on the issue of taxes, Bezos said half of Americans shouldn't pay federal income taxes at all. He cited the example of a theoretical nurse in Queens who earns $75,000 a year and pays about $12,000 in federal income taxes.
"People talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? At all," he said.
"Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes? That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes," Bezos added.
"It's only 3%. We can find 3%. It's a small amount of money for the government," he continued. "And the more I thought about it, to me it's kind of absurd that we're doing this. You know, we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology! It really makes no sense!"
Bezos said it was fine to debate what the wealthy should pay in taxes but went on to accuse politicians of distracting voters by vilifying the wealthy. He added that politicians were ignoring the root problems causing inflation and other economic problems.
"If you're really being honest about it, we don't have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world," Bezos said. "The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all tax revenue, the bottom half pay only 3%, and I think it should be zero."
"We actually have a spending problem," he added and cited the $44,000 that is spent on every child in the New York City school system with worse outcomes than other cities.
"If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system," Bezos joked, "packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee, and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it!"
Sorkin didn't laugh.
"That's a skills issue!" Bezos added. "It's just competence."
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Bezos also argued that the government could double the taxes he pays and it wouldn't help the theoretical nurse in Queens because government spending is so out of control.
"You can't connect those two things, not logically," he said.
The entire segment on taxes with Bezos can be viewed on CNBC's YouTube channel.
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Glenn Beck exposes the Fed’s hidden stash — and it’s worse than we thought
For years, Glenn Beck has called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, arguing it’s nothing more than a private banking cartel that enables endless government spending, devalues the dollar through inflation, and secretly steals wealth from Americans via corrupt monetary policies.
But new evidence that just surfaced proves the problem is even worse than he thought.
To explain what’s been happening behind the American people’s back, Glenn gives an analogy.
“Imagine the U.S. economy is like one giant, never-ending house party that’s been raging for years, and the Federal Reserve is the bartender in charge of the punch bowl. The punch bowl, that’s liquidity, easy money flowing through the banks and the markets and the businesses,” he begins.
For years, the “punch” was overdistributed, making partygoers drunk and willing to make poor decisions. “This is when stocks and houses get wildly overpriced. Companies borrow stupid amounts ... and everybody starts to do stupid things,” Glenn says.
That’s exactly what happened in 2022 when the Federal Reserve “just printed a whole buttload of money,” he says.
But when things “got ugly,” it suddenly reversed course and announced an initiative called “quantitative tightening,” which essentially “drained the whole punch bowl.”
The Federal Reserve “needed to get rid of $2.3 trillion worth of bonds that they owned, and they said, ‘We’re just going to let them expire,”’ Glenn explains.
“In theory, this drains the money out of the system, makes it harder for you to get loans and everything else. Borrowing is more expensive. The bubbles will pop. It forces the economy to sober up.”
But this was just a ruse, Glenn says.
Instead of actually stopping the flow of “punch,” the Federal Reserve during the COVID-19 pandemic quietly redirected it instead.
“A lot of it ended up in a giant backroom keg called the overnight reverse repo facility. ... These are money market funds, big investors, big banks,” Glenn says, “and they parked about $2.5 trillion in for safekeeping, and they were earning a safe interest rate from the Fed.”
But then the backroom keg finally ran dry.
“By 2023, something had changed. The short-term Treasury bills (super safe government IOUs) started paying higher interest than the keg in the back room, so the big investors said, ‘Why are we letting all the alcohol sit in the keg? We can have a party elsewhere,”’ Glenn says. “So they started draining the backroom keg $100-$200 billion every single month, and they poured that money right back into stocks and bonds and lending.”
What was the result?
“More punch than we started with in the first place!” Glenn exclaims.
“That’s why the Dow Jones keeps hitting new highs, government keeps funding huge deficits. ... The bartender was pretending to cut off the drinks while secretly letting the elite guests go into the back room and get the hidden stash.”
These still-drunk elites, Glenn says, continue to “make stupid, dumb bets,” which just makes the “hangover worse” for the normies.
“Look out, gang — you’ve been lied to yet again,” he cautions, calling the Federal Reserve a “criminal organization” that is “stealing from the American people.”
“End the Fed,” he pleads.
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Trump can secure a big win for air travel
The Trump administration has reworked the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program with an eye toward greater efficiency and less top-down regulation. As a result, states are projected to come in roughly $21 billion under budget on broadband deployment. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is actively soliciting ideas for how those funds should be used.
If the administration wants an easy political win and a solution to a real problem, the funds should be used to radically modernize our air traffic control systems.
Roughly 80% of FAA infrastructure is considered obsolete or unsustainable.
Policymakers should seize the moment and invest in something the country desperately needs — something that would deliver real, tangible benefits to the flying public and the broader economy.
The FAA’s own administrator, Bryan Bedford, has been blunt: Roughly 80% of FAA infrastructure is considered obsolete or unsustainable. Controllers are still using paper flight strips and radar systems that date to the Vietnam War era.
The $5 billion Congress appropriates annually for ATC operations sounds substantial until you learn that 85% to 90% of it goes to sustaining legacy systems — patching roofs, repairing elevators, and keeping aging equipment limping along.
Congress did take a meaningful step last year, allocating $12.5 billion in the reconciliation bill toward ATC modernization. Fiber optics are beginning to replace copper wire. Radar upgrades are being compressed from a 20-year timeline into a few years.
The early results are encouraging. But by official FAA estimates, an additional $19 billion is needed to fully complete the job — to build a genuinely modern, integrated national airspace system rather than an expensive patch on a broken one.
This is where BEAD’s leftover $21 billion could make a real impact.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee and has long championed both infrastructure investment and Texas’ status as one of the nation’s busiest aviation hubs, is well positioned to recognize the strategic alignment here.
Texas is home to two of the nation’s largest airports — Dallas Fort Worth and Houston Bush Intercontinental — and its economy runs on the efficient movement of people and commerce. ATC modernization would be a huge benefit for Texans.
The legal question of whether this use fits within the BEAD statute’s framework is one that the NTIA will need to address carefully. The statute is written broadly enough to accommodate creative interpretation, and the administration has already demonstrated it is willing to read BEAD’s parameters with fresh eyes.
A next-generation ATC system — replacing copper with fiber, analog with digital, fragmented local computers with integrated national architecture — looks a great deal like the kind of advanced communications infrastructure BEAD was designed to fund.
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Ironically, it’s easier to make the case that the federal government should be ensuring airline safety than subsidizing broadband deployment.
The BEAD funding was part of the massive infrastructure legislation, and our airline infrastructure is in dire need of investment. And unlike many government spending programs, ATC modernization has a defined scope and measurable milestones. This is not a slush fund — it’s a known project with a known price tag.
The alternative uses being floated for BEAD’s unused funds range from the reasonable to the fanciful: broadband adoption programs, rural mobile coverage, returning funds to the Treasury, and various state-level wish lists.
Some of those ideas have merit. But none of them represent the kind of once-in-a-generation infrastructure opportunity that a modern ATC system would deliver — one that improves safety for millions of air travelers daily, reduces delays that cost the economy billions annually, and positions the United States to lead in the airspace of the future.
The Trump administration’s 2027 budget request is going to include millions of dollars in additional ATC funding, but the BEAD funds are already there, waiting to be invested. That’s the beauty of budget reform — eliminating waste and finding savings can free up funds for other critical public needs.
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