The Washington Post has, over the past few months, run at least five editorials or opinion pieces railing against federal or state tax increases.

Here’s what the folks at the Post are not telling you: If you’re an average American taxpayer, you’re paying federal income tax at a rate that dwarfs the rate the Post’s ultra-billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, is paying.

A typical single American taxpayer with an income of $75,000 will pay about 9.16 percent of that income in federal income tax. That taxpayer will pay another 7.65 percent in Social Security and Medicare tax. The taxpayer’s employer will pay that same 7.65 percent, but that employer contribution actually amounts to part of the taxpayer’s pay package. So do the math: Including the employer’s payment of tax on our taxpayer’s behalf, about 22.7 percent of that taxpayer’s total pay is going for federal tax.

To be clear, we’re talking about tax on income here. Yes, we conventionally label some of these payments as Social Security or Medicare tax, but these payments all amount to taxes on the income average Americans make.

Let’s shift now to a distinctly unaverage American, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, and consider his personal tax liability on income from the sale of his Amazon shares.

Bezos has sold a good bit of his Amazon stock over the years, but he ended 2025 still holding some 880 million shares worth about $203 billion, shares he paid about $200,000 for back in 1994. If Bezos had sold these shares on the last day of 2025, he would have registered about $203 billion of gain. He would have faced standard federal income tax on that gain plus another tax known as the net investment income tax, a Medicare tax substitute for rich investors. Those taxes combined would have totaled about 23.8 percent of his gain, roughly $49.3 billion, leaving him with a tidy personal profit of about $154.8 billion.

Investments, of course, rarely perform as well as the Bezos investment in Amazon. Over 32 years, the value of the Bezos Amazon investment increased one million-fold, with an average annual increase in value of 54 percent.

Let’s place this Bezos tax story in a more enlightening perspective. Let’s imagine another investor — we’ll call her MacKenzie — who has been every bit the investor Bezos has been, with just one difference. MacKenzie has been changing her investment portfolio each and every year. To make the math easier, let’s assume her annual buying and selling has generated the same 54 percent gain each year. MacKenzie would have to pay a tax each year on that annual gain. That tax, in turn, would reduce the total amount she has available each year to invest.

How much would that reduction total? Let’s assume MacKenzie faced a mere 2.5 percent annual tax — more below on the rationale for that figure — on her gains. In her first investing year, MacKenzie’s 54 percent gain on her $200,000 investment would leave her with taxable income of $108,000. A 2.5 percent tax on that income would amount to $2,700, leaving her $305,300 — her original $200,000 plus her investment gain minus her tax on that gain — available for her next home-run investment.

If this annual investment-gain-tax three-step continued for 31 more years, MacKenzie would find herself with a total nest-egg of $153.3 billion, a whisker less than the $154.8 billion the Bezos Amazon investment generated.

There’s one huge difference between our two scenarios: MacKenzie will only have paid about $3.9 billion in tax over her 32 investing years, not even ten percent of the tax Bezos would have to pay after his big sell off.

Why the huge difference? Unlike Bezos, MacKenzie would have been paying tax annually on her income. In other words, she would have paid tax on her investment gains on the same annual schedule that average Americans pay tax on their wages. Bezos,........

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