They earn a lot of money, and they want to pay more taxes. In a letter posted Tuesday, September 5nearly 300 millionaires – but also economists and politicians – ask the leaders of the G20, meeting on September 9 and 10 in New Delhi, to increase taxation of the richest and to put an end to tax evasion allowing some to evade taxes.
“Decades of lowering taxes on the wealthiest, based on the false promise that wealth at the top would benefit everyone, has contributed to rising extreme inequality,” explain the authors of the letter, published on the site Taxextremewealth.com and supported by a series of organizations, including Oxfam, Earth4All or Patriotic Millionaires, an NGO of wealthy Americans promoting a reform of the tax system. “Public polls in all G20 countries show overwhelming support for political action to reduce inequality and tax the big wealth. »
Among the signatories: the millionaire and heiress of the Disney empire Abigail E. Disney, the French economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, the independent American senator Bernie Sanders, the MEP Aurore Lalucq (Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats) or a series former leaders of Eastern Europe. In detail, they offer “an international agreement on wealth tax” and the adoption of new tax regimes “which eliminate the possibility for the ultra-rich to avoid paying their taxes”.
“More and more voices are raised”
In fact, they have been paying less and less for forty years. The top rate of income tax has thus, on average, fallen from 58% in 1980 to 50.3% in 2000 and 42.5% in 2021, in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The work of the World Inequality Lab also shows that, since 1995, multi-millionaires have captured 38% of the additional wealth created, compared to 2% for the poorest half. “Since 2020, the top 1% have captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth”adds the NGO Oxfam, in a statement.
This is not the first time that large fortunes claim to pay more. A pioneer of the genre, the 93-year-old American billionaire Warren Buffett has been increasing calls since 2011. On March 14, around twenty members of Patriotic Millionaires signed a column in The world, “What we have achieved for multinationals, we must do for the big fortunes”, launched by Aurore Lalucq and Gabriel Zucman, which proposes a progressive wealth tax – for example, 1.5% from assets of 50 million euros.
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