After the Global Business Agreement in 2021, it would now be a matter of their bosses not being able to escape the nets of wealth sharing. More than 130 MEPs as well as several economists have signed a petition in favor of the creation of a tax on the wealth of the “ultra-rich” on an international scale, in order to participate in “ecological and social transition”.
“What we have succeeded in achieving for multinationals, we must now do for the very wealthy”write the MEP Aurore Lalucq (Socialists and Democrats group, left) and the economist Gabriel Zucman, at the initiative of this campaign, which also collects the signature of the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, in a column published this Tuesday in The world. They claim that in 2018, Elon Musk, then the second richest man in the world, “didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes” and that in France, “the 370 richest families are actually taxed only around 2 to 3%”.
“Our proposal is simple: introduce a progressive tax on the wealth of the ultra-rich internationally in order to reduce inequalities while participating in the financing of the investments necessary for the ecological and social transition”explain the MEP and the economist, a recognized expert on tax evasion and the taxation of high incomes.
The authors mention the idea of a 1.5% tax on assets of 50 million euros, while affirming that the exact level of the tax will have to be decided “collectively and democratically”. Aurore Lalucq and Gabriel Zucman call on the OECD and the UN to launch negotiations on this tax, and urge the European Union to act. European Central Bank (ECB) chief economist Philip Lane floated a similar idea last year, as did millionaires in Davos in January.
To support their remarks, Aurore Lalucq and Gabriel Zucman cite the example of the minimum tax of 15% on the profits of multinationals, to which nearly 140 countries have adhered. “when everyone repeated that it was impossible”. Their petition was signed mainly by environmentalist and leftist MEPs, by a dozen economists and by international NGOs including Oxfam.
