More than a hundred millionaires and billionaires asked, this Tuesday (18), for their riches to be taxed. Self-styled “Millionaire Patriots”, the group with more than 100 people among the richest in the world signed an open letter published during the virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which began on Monday (17).
The signatories — including Disney heiress Abigail Disney — are calling on political and business leaders to make them pay their share in the global economic recovery after the pandemic crisis. “Force us to pay more taxes,” they say.
According to the group, the current tax system is not fair. “While the world has gone through an immense burden of suffering in the last two years of the pandemic, most of us millionaires can say we have seen their fortunes grow. Yet few of us can say that we have paid our fair share in taxes.”
A spokesperson for the World Economic Forum told Reuters that paying a fair share in taxes has always been one of the organisation’s principles, as has advocating taxation of great wealth – which is what happens in Switzerland, where the organization is based. And that this would be a good model for other countries.
The collection of wealth taxes, however, is not unanimous among tax specialists. In Europe, countries that adopted this taxation backtracked as they considered it expensive and inefficient.
Rising inequality in the pandemic
Data from an Oxfam report show that the fortunes of the world’s ten richest people rose from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion during the first two years. years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The numbers still point out that the income of 99% of humanity fell in the comparison of March 2020 and November 2021. However, a new billionaire appeared every 26 hours.
In the United States, the issue of taxing millionaires and billionaires is not new. According to an analysis by news agency Pro Publica, billionaire American executives paid little or nothing in federal income taxes between 2014 and 2018.
After checking a collection of tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, the agency said the 25 richest Americans paid only a fraction of their wealth in taxes. In the list, the names of Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg e Elon Musk.
In February last year, the leader of the “Patriot Millionaires”, Morris Pearl, and former director of one of the largest investment funds in the world, BlackRock, said that the US should follow a similar path to Argentina and create a tax on wealth to face the economic crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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