As the Senate votes on the budget reconciliation bill that will make catastrophic cuts in health care and food assistance to give tax savings to billionaires, we are treated to headlines about Jeff Bezos’ wedding.

Bezos is the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest people in the world with assets of $231.4 billion.He will be one of the biggest winners of the tax cuts in the reconciliation bill. It is hard to even conceptualize the difference between a million dollars and $231.4 billion. To put this in perspective, consider that a million seconds is about 12 days, while a billion seconds is approximately 32 years, and 231.4 billion seconds would be 7,405 years.

According to news reports, Jeff Bezos is spending an estimated $50 million to celebrate his wedding with 200 other wealthy guests in Venice, Italy. The wedding site The Knot reports that the average wedding in America costs $33,000, although we know many people have backyard weddings for far less. Suppose for a moment that Bezos spent a mere $1 million on his wedding, which is more than 30 times what most Americans can afford, and then used the other $49 million to help feed the hungry and support health care for babies, moms, veterans, and the elderly. He would still have a lavish wedding, and at the same time contribute to improving the lives of those less fortunate.

Bezos’ wedding dinner alone is estimated to cost $1,800 per guest, a total of about $360,000. The average daily allotment from SNAP for food assistance is $6.16 per person per day. The Bezos wedding dinner could provide food to 1,948 people on SNAP for a full month. Why is Congress cutting SNAP to give Bezos, and other billionaires, more money?

Even if Congress imposed a 2 percent tax on his wealth, Bezos would still have nearly $227 billion and would still be one of the wealthiest people in the world. As one of the millions of Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide who have been helping to create Bezos’ massive wealth, I don’t think our government owes him any favors.

The big question is why does U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, R, Watersmeet, care more about Jeff Bezos than he cares about people in the Upper Peninsula who will be deprived of basic nutrition and health care as a result of the drastic budget cuts in the reconciliation bill?