international organization Oxfam spoke out in favor of implementation of emergency and also permanent taxes on the rich. Those funds would finance support for people facing accelerating global inflation as a result of rising energy and food costs. The entity gave as an example the tribute to the Great Fortunes applied in Argentina.
“Argentina last year adopted a unique wealth tax for the richest as part of its Covid-19 campaignand is now considering introducing an extraordinary tax on energy sector profits, as well as a one-off 20 percent contribution on undeclared offshore assets to directly finance IMF loans,” the report said.
The report presented by Oxfam is called “Profiting from Pain” and was presented within the framework of the Davos Forum summit, which brings together nearly 2,500 business executives and world leaders in the Swiss city. The VIP meeting was held for the first time since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020.
tax on the rich
Oxfam’s text argues that there is a “urgent need” to add three types of taxes on the rich. First, it calls for introducing one-time solidarity taxes on billionaires’ pandemic windfalls to finance support for people facing rising food and energy costs and to finance economic recovery from the pandemic. According to the report, “the super-rich have hidden nearly $8 billion in tax havens.”
The Argentine government presented almost a month ago his idea of capturing through a tax the unexpected profits derived from the rise in commodities due to the war, although no concrete steps yet to carry out the initiative.
Second, Oxfam proposes “a 90 percent temporary tax on excess and windfall profits of large corporations to capture windfall profits across industries and sectors.” Oxfam estimates that such a tax on 32 corporations would have generated an additional $104 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.
Finally, the organization asks to introduce permanent wealth taxes to control extreme wealth and monopoly power, as well as the outsized carbon emissions of the super-rich. “An annual wealth tax for millionaires starting at just 2 percent and 5 percent for billionaires might generate $2.52 trillion a year, enough to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty, manufacture vaccines for the world and provide universal health care and social protection for all who live in low-income countries,” said Oxfam.
Inequality
According to Oxfam data, the number of milmillonarios in the world grew by 573 people in 2020, bringing that select group to 2,668. In total, they own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion from before the pandemic. Likewise, for every new billionaire created during the pandemic, almost a million people might be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022.
The organization also warns that “The 10 richest men in the world own more wealth than the 3.1 billion people who make up the poorest 40 percent of humanity. and that “the wealth of the 20 richest billionaires exceeds the GDP of all sub-Saharan African countries combined.”
“A worker who is in the poorest 50 percent of the world would have to work 112 years to get the same income as what a person from the richest 1 percent gets in a single year,” he calculates.
