The Patriotic Millionaires are urging global leaders to impose a wealth tax on the world’s billionaires to build fairer economies post COVID. According to an analysis conducted by the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, if billionaires paid an annual wealth tax in 2020, “modeled on the ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax’ levy proposed by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren,” an estimated $345 billion in wealth taxes would have been paid globally.
The analysis used data from Forbes, Bloomberg and Wealth-X and determined that “the planet’s 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase US $4 trillion, or 54 percent, during the pandemic year,” according to a press release.
“As a millionaire I know personally that our economy enshrines wealth for the few—to the detriment of ordinary people in our country,” Morris Pearl, Chair of Patriotic Millionaires and former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., said. “We all deserve more than a pre-COVID path to recovery.”
According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a wealth tax would raise $4.14 trillion over the next decade. The U.S., which makes up one-third of the global billionaire wealth, would have raise more than $17 billion is a wealth tax was applied to Bezos, Bloomberg, Buffet, Musk, and Zuckerberg alone.
“The billionaire pandemic windfalls should be taxed to cover the cost of vaccinating the world and reducing inequality throughout the global economy,” Chuck Collins, researcher for the Program on Inequality at IPS, said. “Unless we tax the world’s billionaires, the legacy of the pandemic will be accelerated concentrations of wealth and power.”
The Patriotic Millionaires are calling on global leaders to “focus efforts on taxing wealth as a central pillar in national and global policy making,” according to a press release.
“We need to foster a recovery beyond regressing to the same-old, same-old. We need to tax the rich,” Pearl said.
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