300 prominent figures call on G20 to tax the super-rich
Brussels Correspondence // On the eve of the G20 group's meeting in Delhi, which includes the world's most advanced economies, the Western press publishes an open letter signed by 300 prominent figures from various fields, including even multimillionaires, eminent economists, and politicians. They are urging the G20 to "tax the super-rich."
Among the signatories of the letter are diverse personalities such as British musician Brian Eno, economists Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel laureate), US Senator Bernie Sanders, and even 120 multimillionaires, including Abigail Disney, the heiress to the entertainment empire of the same name.
In their open letter, they demand a fairer taxation of the wealthy worldwide to alleviate the horrors of poverty and inequality. Without such an adjustment, they write, extreme wealth and inequality will continue to skyrocket.
Commenting on the letter, OXFAM points out that over the past decade, billionaires have doubled their wealth, from $5.6 trillion to $11.8 trillion. Those with over $50 million have seen an 18.3% increase in their wealth, while billionaires have seen their wealth grow by 109%.
Only 4 cents of every dollar in tax revenue come from wealth taxes.
The massive accumulation of obscene wealth by a small number of individuals is described as an "economic, ecological, and human rights disaster" that "threatens political stability worldwide," according to the signatories' appeal to global leaders.
Rejecting the "false promise that the wealth of the elite would somehow benefit everyone," they insist that the G20 must act now to create a fairer tax regime that can collect the trillions of dollars needed from the wealthy to address enormous global threats.
These 300 millionaires, economists, and political representatives from nearly all G20 countries are calling for a new international agreement on wealth taxes to "prevent extreme wealth from corroding our common future." The 300 stress that people around the world are "desperate for change."
When the US taxed wealth at 70%.
In their book, "The Triumph of Injustice," published in October 2019 in the United States, two French researchers from Berkeley, California, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, known as the "Piketty boys" (a reference to the famous Chicago boys, followers of economist Milton Friedman who conducted experiments on Chile's economy during Pinochet's era), wrote a history of American taxation, from the early colonists who imposed a wealth tax to the 19th century when taxes were deemed unconstitutional, and up to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who imposed a wealth tax ranging from 20% to as high as 70%! "The US came closer at that time, more than any other country in the world, to the idea of a legal maximum income," the authors write (note: maximum legal income, not minimum income). It was only during Reagan's era that the wealth tax was lowered to 28%, the lowest in the entire Western world. "Reagan," the authors say, "created an environment where not paying taxes became a patriotic act."
(Saez and Zucman are called the "Piketty boys" because they are disciples of the "iconoclastic" Frenchman Thomas Piketty, a signatory of the 300-letter. Piketty found such success in the US that his book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," even sold in airport newsstands for a while.)
When Joe Biden Wants to Tax the Wealthy Again
Moreover, unprecedented since the fall of communism, US President Joe Biden wants to tax the wealthy again and has set his sights on multinational corporations that do not pay enough taxes, as if he were an emulation of socialist François Hollande, the former French president who, in his efforts to make the visibly wealthy pay their share, drove the poor actor Gérard Depardieu to exile himself with Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov (where he was immediately rewarded with Russian citizenship and an apartment in Grozny).
So, in the atmosphere of religious neoliberalism in Eastern Europe (a veritable sect in the case of some "invisible hand" ideologues), there isn't much discussion about the fact that Joe Biden plans to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% and has even proposed this globally for multinational corporations that hide and do not pay.
Even Mark Zuckerberg Proposed Higher Taxes
But here's the surprising part – even Mark Zuckerberg, at the Munich Security Conference in February 2020, proposed that internet giants like Facebook or Google should pay higher taxes, a topic of ongoing tension between the US and the EU. Furthermore, the Facebook founder hinted that he would agree to the creation of a global digital tax regime.
How is this perceived in Eastern Europe, where market ideologues presented it as a given that "the assisted" deserved their fate and had to fend for themselves? What are millionaires like Zuckerberg up to, after all? Are they abandoning "capitalism"? It won't be long before we see them proposing a universal income. A topsy-turvy world...
The difference is that in the US, "rich" means something different from here. "Rich" means earning one million dollars or more per year. In certain parts of Europe, being "rich" means that when you pay with a card, you no longer worry about whether there's enough on it or not.
Translation by Iurie Tataru
Signed by: DAN ALEXE
