The Washington Post‘s slogan warns us that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In true Orwellian fashion, its Editorial Board is showing us how.
Besides donating to and attending Trump’s January 2025 inauguration as a VIP, Jeff Bezos has cozied up to Trump by shaking up the opinions section of The Washington Post, which he has owned since 2013. A month after Trump was inaugurated, Bezos announced that the section would, from then on, write every day in support of “personal liberties and free markets.” At the time, we assumed that this was fancy speak for making the opinions section take an economically conservative bent. And after 17 months of reading one outrageous headline after another, we know that we were right.
For this week’s Closer Look, we want to share four of the most ridiculous opinion pieces we’ve seen from the Post’s Editorial Board in recent months, and then offer our thoughts on them. There were, unfortunately, dozens of pieces to choose from, but we selected the four below to give you the best taste possible of where the Post stands these days on our issues. At the end of the day, the number of pieces that the Editorial Board has published in recent months, along with the strained logic they deploy in them, shows what they are really out to do: undermine any policy choices that may interfere with Bezos’, Trump’s, and their fellow oligarchs’ accumulation of wealth.
“America’s income tax is progressive” – April 14, 2026
The Post’s Editorial Board gifted this headline to America on the eve of Tax Day. They thought they were doing America a favor by assuring everyone that rich people like us really do pay our fair share in taxes. But considering how easy their argument is to debunk, they only confirmed our fears that they’re only out to do their boss’s ideological bidding.
In the piece, they trotted out a bunch of statistics to show that the rich pay the most in federal income taxes, including the perennial classic: the top 1% of earners pay 40% of all income taxes. We don’t deny that the taxpayers who report the most income on their tax returns pay the most actual, literal dollars in federal income taxes. Most of those taxpayers indeed are rich, but there are many rich taxpayers who aren’t in the group of top income reporters. And when you look at the taxes that the rich pay as a percentage of their true economic income— especially the buckets of income from the growth in value of their stocks, bonds, and other assets—there is no getting around the fact that they are not paying anywhere near their “fair share.”
Apparently, the Editorial Board didn’t catch the bombshell 2021 ProPublica report that revealed that, between 2014 and 2018, their boss, Jeff Bezos, paid a true income tax rate of just 0.98% on $99 billion in gains. And (!) that he actually got away with paying $0 in income taxes in 2007 and 2011. Meanwhile, in 2018, the average taxpayer in America paid a 13.3% income tax rate.
Consider what the Post is really saying. There’s a group of 30,000 or so taxpayers who report a lot of income and collectively pay substantial income tax. But tax fairness is not measured on a collective basis, it’s measured on an individual basis. So, yes, that group of 30,000 taxpayers includes thousands who are reporting huge levels of compensation taxed at fairly high rates. But it also includes thousands whose income consists entirely of dividends and capital gains taxed at very low rates. The fair rates of tax paid by the high compensation earners don’t make the low rates of tax paid by the coupon clippers fair. But the Post’s presentation is written to trick readers into believing just that.
To their credit, the Post’s Editorial Board did recognize the fact that working people do pay other taxes besides federal income taxes and that they are not, in their words, “freeloaders.” They just conveniently neglected to mention that, when you do the math on ALL the taxes we have on the books, the 400 wealthiest Americans pay a lower effective tax rate than the average person.
Long story short, despite what the Post’s Editorial Board would have you believe—and what Jeff Bezos himself tried to push in a CNBC interview in May–our tax system is nowhere near “progressive” and rich people like us are absolutely not paying anywhere near our fair share in taxes.
“Bernie Sanders’s 2028 litmus test would strangle America’s golden goose” – March 2, 2026
The Editorial Board used this piece to take aim at the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, legislation introduced by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) which would establish a 5% annual wealth tax on America’s 900+ billionaires. We don’t talk about wealth taxes often, so we thought this one would be fun and useful to highlight.
From what we know about wealth taxes, the Post’s arguments against Sanders and Khanna’s bill don’t hold water. To start, they point out that most billionaires’ wealth is tied up in illiquid assets, which would mean that they would have to sell assets to pay a wealth tax. There are ways around this though. Taxpayers can defer paying the tax for a few years (with interest), or they can average their wealth over several years to account for years when their net worth fluctuates widely. It’s also a bit rich—no pun intended—to believe that billionaires, with the biggest and most diverse portfolios of anyone in the country, couldn’t somehow manage to pay a 5% tax on their net worth without losing everything.
Another thing the Post whines about is the administrative challenge that would come with valuing hard-to-value assets like private businesses, jewelry, and yachts for a tax like Sanders and Khanna’s. We’re not denying that this would be hard, but it’s not insurmountable. For example, private businesses are regularly valued on secondary markets for things like mergers and acquisitions and venture capital funding. To make a wealth tax work, these secondary markets could simply be required to report their valuations to the IRS. And let’s not forget the government already administers a form of wealth tax in the estate tax, which involves the IRS having to review hard-to-value asset valuations.
Jeff Bezos is in no way America’s golden goose—working people are. But even if he was, he certainly wouldn’t be getting “strangled” by being required to pay a $12.6 billion tax (5% of his current worth of $252 billion). After all, he’d still be a billionaire, and that’s a sweet deal if there ever was one.
If you still don’t believe the Post’s editors are doing ideological gymnastics to protect their boss’s fortune, you can check out another piece they wrote in November on inheritance tax, which is another kind of wealth tax. They said, “Taxing work is not ideal, but an income tax is easier for a government to maintain than claiming unrealized gains that are part of someone’s estate.” In other words, the Post thinks that taxing struggling workers’ wages is a better policy choice than taxing their boss’s $252 billion of Amazon gains when he dies. Got it.
“Lower inequality does not guarantee better democracy” – July 3, 2026
It took us a minute to recover from the shock of reading that headline last week. But it took us even longer to recover from how difficult it was to make sense of the Post’s argument to justify it.
The Post uses a comparison of the United States and the United Kingdom to make their case. After citing some figures to show that income inequality has fallen in the UK over the years, they go on to say that British democracy is still unhealthy.
The first piece of evidence that they share to back up their claim is: “The country has cycled through seven prime ministers in the last ten years.” This is…confusing, to say the least. To us, the cycling of top leaders is, if anything, a sign of health in a democracy, as people are paying attention to their politics and no one person is retaining power for too long. What does the Post have to say about the fact that America had four presidents in an eight year span (between January 2017 and January 2025)?
It’s possible that the Post’s editors are trying to imply that, in spite of its high level of income inequality, America has a healthier democracy than Britain—although we admit we could be wrong here, because again the piece really is that confusing. If we’re right, we couldn’t disagree more.
We have a campaign finance system that allows 300 billionaire families to contribute 19% of all spending in a presidential election. We have research that shows that average Americans exhibit no influence whatsoever on public policy outcomes; instead, it’s affluent Americans and their business groups that are calling the shots. We have healthcare CEOs being shot in broad daylight and people cheering about it on social media. We have a billionaire president who is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government who has targeted his political enemies who has ignored court orders who is openly and brazenly profiteering from the presidency who has been accused of violating international law who…you get the idea. And finally, we have billionaires like Jeff Bezos who have sucked up the ownership rights to just about every traditional media and social media outlet and are using them to propagate their self-interested beliefs to the masses.
We’re not experts in UK politics, but we know that they are experiencing a disturbing rise in civil unrest like us. And while they may be better than us on income inequality, they’re still not great when compared to the rest of the developed world. In short, the US and UK both have work to do on our democracies, and that work, by definition, must involve shrinking inequality. You can’t separate the two.
“The anti-affordability agenda” – July 6, 2026
What says “personal liberties and free markets” more than taking a dig at the minimum wage?
In this piece, the Post took aim at Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy and Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez’s (IL-03) Living Wage For All Act, which would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour and end subminimum wages. They trotted out all of the classic arguments against it, which we’ll quickly debunk for you.
They said the bill would hike prices. That’s wrong.
They said the bill would kill jobs. That’s wrong.
They said the bill doing away with the tipped minimum wage would make restaurants close, and used DC as an example. That’s wrong.
Bottom line, a higher minimum wage and the elimination of subminimum tipped wages should be an essential part of any lawmakers’ affordability agenda. Because someone like Jeff Bezos can absolutely afford to pay his workers peeing in bottles more to let them afford basic essentials.
Conclusion
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is a pretty ironic slogan for the Post considering the turn that their opinions section has taken over the last year and a half. By going “dark” on promoting seemingly any economic policy that would reduce inequality and put a dent in Jeff Bezos’ and other oligarchs’ wealth, the Post is moving us backwards, not forwards, in our fight to protect our democracy against the threat of oligarchy.
We expect that the Post’s Editorial Board will continue to churn out even more outrageous headlines than the ones we’ve shared today. But we won’t tire of setting the record straight on them. Because unlike Bezos, we’re a group of rich people that wants to spread the power, create an economy that works for everyone, and brighten our democracy.