Aufruf von Oxfam und anderen Hilfsorganisationen, 12.8.2021 (engl. Originalfassung)
A one-off 99 percent levy on billionaires’ wealth gains during the pandemic could pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide a $20,000 cash grant to all unemployed workers, according to new analysis released today by Oxfam, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Patriotic Millionaires. The organizations are calling on governments to tax the ultra wealthy who profited from the pandemic crisis to help offset its costs.
The one-time emergency COVID-19 billionaire tax would raise $5.4 trillion and still leave the world’s 2,690 billionaires $55 billion richer than before the virus struck. Governments across the world are massively under-taxing the wealthiest individuals and big corporations, which is undermining the fight against COVID-19 and poverty and inequality.
The world’s billionaires have a collective net worth of $13.5 trillion ―up from $8 trillion at the beginning of the pandemic, a gain of nearly 69 percent. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ wealth increased by $79.4 billion during the pandemic, rising from $113 billion in March 2020 to $192.4 billion. Billionaire wealth has increased more over the past 17 months than it has in the past 15 years, and 325 new billionaires joined the ‘3-comma club’ since the pandemic began ―equivalent to roughly one new billionaire minted every day.
Less than one percent of people in low-income countries have received a vaccine, while the profits made by Big Pharma has seen the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech become billionaires. The COVID-19 crisis has pushed over 200 million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020, equivalent to more than the combined GDP of 98 countries. At the same time, 11 people are now dying of hunger and malnutrition each minute, outpacing COVID-19 fatalities.
[...]
Policymakers, leading economists, civil society organizations, the UN, IMF and the World Bank are calling for one-time ‘solidarity taxes’ and longer-term wealth taxes targeted at the super-rich to mitigate the economic impacts of the pandemic and reduce inequalities. In December 2020, debt-saddled Argentina adopted a one-off special levy dubbed the ‘millionaire’s tax’ that has brought in around $2.4 billion to pay for pandemic recovery.
Den vollständigen Aufruf finden Sie hier.