205 millionaires and billionaires appealed to the WEF to tax them

A group of 205 super-rich people sent a letter to the participants of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, urging them to urgently introduce taxes on wealth, The Guardian reports. Among the signatories of the letter entitled "The price of excessive wealth" are representatives of 13 countries, including the owner of the Disney company Abigail Disney and Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo.

"The history of the last five decades is a history of wealth that flows exclusively upward. Over the past few years, this trend has accelerated significantly (...) The solution is obvious. You, our representatives all over the world, should tax us, the super-rich, and it needs to start right now." "Patriotic millionaires", as the members of the group call themselves, write that the event in Davos dedicated to "cooperation in a fragmented world" is meaningless if the root cause of this fragmentation, social inequality, is not eliminated. "Protecting democracy and establishing cooperation require actions to build a fairer economy right now – this is not a problem that can be left to our children to solve. It's time to get into extreme wealth; it's time to tax the super-rich."

The validity of these words is confirmed by the research of Oxfam, an organization dedicated to solving problems of poverty and social inequality. As her calculations show, 63%, that is, almost two-thirds of the new wealth accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic, went to the richest 1%. For the first time in the last quarter of a century, the growth of extreme wealth is accompanied by an increase in extreme poverty, Oxfam says. A tax of up to 5% on multimillionaires and billionaires would raise $1.7 trillion a year – enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty and pay for a global project to eradicate hunger.