With the House passage of the domestic spending bill earlier this week, certain billionaires and corporate CEOs should be rubbing their hands together with glee. The bill contains massive tax giveaways for corporations and billionaires that will come at enormous cost to working people and our democracy.

In the op-ed, Sarah and I draw on our latest research produced with the Athena Coalition, which exposes the billions of dollars that Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and current CEO Andy Jassy have raked in through tax loopholes.

To give you a rough idea of those numbers: in 2018, thanks to the 2017 Trump tax cuts, Jeff Bezos avoided paying $6.2 billion dollars in federal taxes on capital gains, while Amazon recorded a negative federal tax rate.

We also explored what Amazon and its top executives have been doing with their major tax windfalls. Spoiler: not making serious investments in their workforce, that’s for sure.

Instead, the corporation has been spending money on union busting, hiring lobbyists to block worker protections, and throwing its weight behind the Trump regime. This looks like:

Donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration (where Bezos joined the line-up of tech billionaires),
Investing in technologies that the Trump regime is now using, like cloud services that undergird tech platforms used by ICE, and
Developing surveillance tech to track warehouse workers’ every move, a model that DOGE is now drawing on to surveil federal workers.

It’s not just Amazon, though it’s a prime example of corporations and billionaires benefiting from our rigged tax system while selling out our freedoms. As the legislation moves on to the Senate, we must amplify the demands for a tax system that benefits all of us, not just billionaires and massive corporations.

As you head into the long weekend, I hope you take a moment to read our new piece and to dig into the tax research we published earlier this month.