@Satsuma @neil bam! tax evation!

@saxnot @neil tax evasions mostly a) delawares fault and b) politics preventing the IRS from doing their job

Its not something where you can ever collect 100% on, but we could definitely collect way more than we currently are

@Satsuma @neil plus, most of it isn't lying around on his bank account. Those are amazon stocks. You can't just liquidate them just because "hey dude you're too rich"

@saxnot @neil I mean, you could technically

@neil @bob Sidenote: kudos on the "Go slow and fix things" tagline 👍

@taoeffect @bob Well, the source article is also time.com: http://time.com/money/5262923/amazon-employee-median-salary-jeff-bezos/

@neil @bob OK, great, next, you look at how they came up with that figure, and you'll notice that as is often the case, the text of the article does not match the claim in the headline of the article:

@neil @bob I could equally come up with an equally "true" headline + conclusion that "Jeff Bezos Is Losing $28,000 every 9 seconds"

@neil @bob And both headlines would be equally misleading sensationalism that exists for the purposes of getting people riled up.

Behind the scenes, it is far more likely that someone at TIME got pissed off at Jeff and ran this article because he did something they don't like. That's really why this article exists, is my guess, because it's nonsense.

@taoeffect Yeah, fair point. It would only be accurate to say that his net worth increased by this amount in this date range. Which equates to this amount per second. With no guarantee that it will continue to rise at this rate, and may in fact decrease.

That aside, however you frame it, Jeff Bezos' net worth is currently, and likely will be consistently, many, many, orders of magnitude greater than most people's on the planet, no?

@neil Yes, certainly, but some people have penises that are many orders of magnitude longer than others. I can see how some would think that's a crime (and maybe it is), but, when compared to crimes like 9/11 by our own government, it is a very insignificant crime.

@neil Unfortunately, since if interest rates rose back to the historical mean of around 5% debt service would be the largest item in the US Federal budget, I don't see this happening.

Similar things are happening in other developed economies as well, and the situation is the same even if you are an MMT devotee, the explanation is just different.