“Each billionaire represents a failure of public policy,” advances the NGO Oxfam in a report published at the opening of the Davos Forum on Monday, which campaigns to halve their number by 2030 thanks to taxes, before d ‘abolish’ in the long run. billionaires
“Economic inequalities have reached extreme and dangerous levels,” writes the international organization in its annual report on inequalities, at the start of a week of exchanges between economic and political elites in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.
More numerous and increasingly rich
Fueled by rising stock prices, fortunes have skyrocketed in the last ten years: out of $100 of wealth created, $54.4 has gone into the pockets of the top 1%, while 70 cents has gone benefited the less fortunate 50%, says the NGO.
Billionaires have doubled their fortunes and are becoming more numerous, says Oxfam, whose director general, Gabriela Bucher, is invited to Switzerland.
However, “the extreme concentration of wealth undermines economic growth, corrupts politicians and the media, corrodes democracy and increases polarization,” the NGO writes, adding that inequality has become “a threat existential for our societies, crippling our ability to end poverty. and put “in danger the future of the planet (…)”.
NGO campaigns for a wealth tax
According to the international organization, taxation has a “crucial” role to play in reducing the number of billionaires on the planet, and must affect the income and capital of the richest.
Among the measures proposed in this report, an exceptional tax on wealth, a tax on dividends and an increase in taxation on income from work and capital of the richest 1%.
Capital, a financial windfall “much more important than wages” for large fortunes, should be taxed more for the profits obtained, particularly thanks to the sale of shares, but also for simple possession, the organization stresses.
The “super profits” of companies are also in the crosshairs of Oxfam, which proposes to tax windfall profits more, such as the billions registered by oil groups in recent months thanks to the rise in energy prices, in a context of war in Ukraine.
According to the NGO, these measures would return the fortune of billionaires and their number to what they were in 2012, before the numbers vanished.
Source: BFM TV
