Amazon founder Jeff Bezos vs. US President Joe Biden: Dispute over inflation and taxes on Twitter

Enlarge image

Exchange of blows:

US President

and Amazon founder

are at loggerheads over high inflation rates in the US

Photo: AP;

JIM WATSON/AFP

Amazon founder

(58) continues his private dispute with the White House even after the change of president.

Bezos was already permanently at odds

with former US President

(79).

The subject of the dispute are two hot topics about which the men have quite different opinions: the escalating inflation rates in the USA and the taxation of large corporations and particularly the wealthy.

The starting point of the dispute was a message that appeared on Friday last week under Biden's account on the short message service Twitter.

"You want to lower inflation?" Biden wrote there.

"First, let's make sure the richest companies pay their fair share."

Bezos accuses Biden of misdirection

Bezos apparently felt personally addressed by this message, which Biden sent to his more than 34 million followers on Twitter.

Biden's predecessor, Trump, had regularly mocked the allegedly low tax payments made by Bezos' retail group Amazon.

And Biden was not the first to hit this notch, criticism of Amazon came from him earlier.

In an interview with the US broadcaster CNBC two years ago, Biden demanded that Amazon "start paying its taxes".

In any case, Bezos, as one of the richest people in the world per se, is in the sights of the Democratic Party in the USA, which routinely criticizes the unequal distribution of wealth in society.

According to Forbes, Bezos currently has private wealth of around $137 billion, which makes him the second richest person in the world after Tesla boss

(50, currently around $221 billion).

However, Bezos did not want to recognize the connection between the high inflation rates in the USA and the taxation of large companies, which was put forward by Biden.

Consumer prices in the United States have recently risen by more than 8 percent for the year, the fastest pace in more than 40 years.

The US President's tweet is a case for the US Homeland Security Agency's newly created Disinformation Board, the Amazon founder tweeted.

Both high inflation and possible increases in corporate taxes are important issues.

Mixing them up, however, is misleading.

Statement from Washington

That was the start of the exchange of blows.

Bezos followed up on Sunday when he criticized the US government for providing additional stimulus to an already overheated, inflationary economy.

The entrepreneur was apparently alluding to the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that the Biden government passed in March last year to fight the Corona crisis.

Inflation harms those who have the least wealth, the Amazon founder continues.

Deception does not help the country.

That, in turn, prompted a response from the White House.

It doesn't take much effort to see why the world's second-richest person opposes Biden's plans to raise taxes on the super-rich and corporations, the statement said.

In addition, it is not surprising that Bezos' tweet appears after Biden met with employee representatives, including those from Amazon.

The US government thus brought another aspect into the dispute – an allusion that hardly contributed to the objectivity of the discussion.

Bezos' reply was not long in coming.

The White House understandably wants to complicate the issue and make it unclear.

"You know inflation hits the people most in need," he wrote on Twitter.

However, neither trade unions nor rich people are responsible for this.

Criticism of high government spending

Once again, the multi-billionaire passed the buck to the US government on the issue of inflation.

Bezos said it was trying to spur another $3.5 trillion in additional government spending, referring to President Biden's failed "Build Back Better" program.

This was intended to increase taxes for the super-rich and companies in order to use the proceeds to finance, among other things, raising children, education and the fight against climate change.

Had the plan gone through, inflation in the US would be higher today than it already is, Bezos said.

The dispute shows how much the enormous increase in consumer prices is also heating up tempers in the USA.

Neither US President Joe Biden nor Jeff Bezos, the head of one of the country's largest companies, is apparently willing to be accused of being responsible for the high inflation rates.

At the same time, both use the topic for political propaganda.

However, economists believe they know the causes of the price increases: economic stimulus therefore plays just as much a role as the renewed demand from consumers after the Corona crisis.

Added to this is the war in Ukraine, which has pushed up the prices for oil, gas and other energy sources in particular, as well as for wheat and other foodstuffs.

Delivery bottlenecks, for example for semiconductor chips, are also driving inflation rates.

However, most of these aspects were not addressed in the Twitter dispute between Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden.

Not yet.