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Without taxpayer dollars, all those trucks carrying Bezos’ profits would be bumping along dirt roads getting stuck in the mud and skidding into ditches.
There is no one on the face of this earth who depends more on the largess of the American taxpayer than zillionaire Jeff Bezos. The man who famously, or infamously, announced last month that the Washington Post editorial policy will henceforth be “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” ships about 1.6 million Amazon packages a day using taxpayer-built roads and skies controlled by the taxpayer-built and financed FAA air control system.
The same goes for every other billionaire whose products move on the public highways and local road systems. There is not a mile of the interstate highway system that wasn’t built with public monies, usually 90 percent federal tax dollars with 10 percent provided by the states through which the ribbons of asphalt and concrete pass. Those roads are maintained and kept safe with gas taxes Americans pay when they put fuel their cars. You will note, Jeff, that the federal and state surcharges on gasoline aren’t donations freely contributed by happy drivers. They are the thing you libertarians say you hate so much: taxes that have made you very, very rich.
Without taxpayer dollars, all those trucks carrying Bezos’ profits would be bumping along dirt roads getting stuck in the mud and skidding into ditches. The pilots of the cargo planes carrying Amazon boxes would be arguing with each other about who gets to take off first and which plane gets to fly which azimuth at what altitude from Chicago to Reno or Kansas City to Fort Lauderdale. Two or three mid-air collisions later, and people would be left to line up at Walmart to buy their boxer shorts and bras from Vietnam and Bangladesh, shipped to the store on the same taxpayer-funded roads used by Bezos’ trucks.
The iron in the trucks’ diesel engines, the aluminum sides of the trailers and the shipping containers filled with washing machines and refrigerators? All of it trucked from steel and aluminum producers to factories and from there to Home Depot or Lowes or Best Buy, so the wealthy men who own those stores—and they’re all men—pull down their millions and billions courtesy of, you guessed it, the American taxpayer they are all so contemptuous of because they don’t have the crooked accountants and off-shore tax shelters enjoyed by Trump and Bezos and their golfing buddies.
I could go on with the tax breaks local governments give Bezos and Amazon to get them to build minimum-wage warehouses in their fading towns and counties, with a reminder that every tax break given a corporation or billionaire is paid for by higher taxes on real estate and residents of those towns and counties.
But you get the picture. Bezos is the recipient of an especially egregious free ride on the infrastructure and systems built over the last hundred years or so that have made this country such a wonderful place to accumulate wealth. Billionaires like Bezos act as if our highway system and air control system was put there just for their companies to exploit and provide them with profits. Not only that, their political party, the Republican Party, has constructed a political church out of the lie that it’s time to cut taxes and forget upkeep of old infrastructure and building new bridges and roads. We’ve got ours, so fuck the rest of you.
That’s the thing about money. You get enough of it, and you can turn ideology into profit and profit into pain for all those suckers running down warehouse corridors trying to fill package quotas by pissing in Coke cans and water bottles. Add some cosmetic surgery, a few personal trainers, and a 417-foot yacht, and you’ve got the new American dream, man, abs and all.
By the way, there is a job opening to be Washington Post editorial page editor. Bring your resume and Cato Institute membership card and knee pads if you want to apply.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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