Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast.

Today is Wednesday, July 21st, 2021. I am John Pudhor. It's the editor of Commentary Magazine with me is always executive editor, eight Greenwald, hi, eight.

Hi John.

Associate editor, Norothman, hi, Noah.

Hi John.

And senior writer, Christine Rosen, hi, Christine.

Hi John.

So we talked about this a lot yesterday, but I thought maybe we want to talk a little bit more about it today, which was the Jeff Bezos,

Blue Origins 11 minute flight into near space yesterday.

And the peculiar response, not of like ordinary people, but of the American liberal ruling class to Bezos' to this, you know, to this space exploration, which was

really in contemptuous, full of loathing and bizarre hostility to, as though Bezos had done something wrong, you know, as though he had done something

suspicious by spending his money on this. And just want to read a couple of quotes from relevant politicians.

So Noah yesterday read out a Catherine Clark, the congressman from Massachusetts saying, you know, Jeff Bezos needs to pay his fair share of taxes.

So I then went and looked up what Jeff Bezos paid in taxes, pro public of somehow managed to secure his taxes.

You may or may not remember, which is itself pretty staggering and shocking that this could happen.

But I'm sorry I'm having a little trouble locating this, but he paid a billion from between 2006 and 2018, Jeff Bezos paid $1.4 billion in taxes.

Maybe that's not enough for you. Maybe that's not enough for Catherine Clark and very southern, it seems like a lot of money. Am I mistaken in that?

Did I get this wrong? Is that not a lot of money?

The tweet that I enjoyed was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's favorite publication, The Jacobin, which said, billionaires like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are parasites.

They are worse than socially useless, but they've got to justify their existence somehow. So like five-year-olds, they're now pretending to be astronauts.

So I found the use of the word parasite kind of fascinating. Those three guys, three or four guys among the group of them, have created more jobs than say any democratic socialist organization in this country has created.

But again, it's a kind of contempt for people spending their wealth on something that might potentially be socially useful down the line.

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