New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani replied to billionaire Jeff Bezos’ claim that even if Bezos doubled the amount of taxes he pays, it’s “not going to help” a teacher in Queens, New York.

“I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ,” Mamdani wrote on Wednesday on X.

During a Wednesday interview on CNBC, Bezos responded to a question about the critiques of many Democratic politicians who say that Bezos and other billionaires don’t pay enough in taxes. Bezos said he pays “billions of dollars in taxes.”

“If people want me to pay more billions, then let’s have that debate,” Bezos added. “But don’t pretend that that’s going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you.”

The Amazon founder also said that politicians are using the “age-old technique of picking a villain” and “pointing fingers,” but he added that it doesn’t solve anything. He said the root cause needs to be fixed.

“A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year, pays more than $12,000 a year in taxes,” Bezos said. “Does that really make sense? Some 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 the “vilification” of billionaires is a “distraction” and that the country doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem, which is “a skills issue.”

He added that New York spends $44,000 per student, more than other big cities, like Houston and Chicago.

“If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive,” Bezos said. “We’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee, and then when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway.”

Bezos also critiqued an earlier Mamdani video on social media, where the mayor stands in front of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin’s New York City home to announce New York City’s new pied-à-terre tax, which puts an additional tax on luxury second homes in the city. Bezos said Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund founder, did nothing to deserve to be called out.

“It’s a policy debate. Policy debates don’t have to be finger-pointing,” Bezos said, though he conceded the pied-à-terre tax would be a “fine thing.”

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