This week, over 2,700 world leaders attended the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Throughout their keep within the Swiss ski resort, elites from enterprise, politics, and civil society have been discussing humanity’s most urgent issues below the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World.”
In the event that they need to encourage cooperation in our world’s very fractured geopolitical panorama, the reply is straightforward: finish the age of maximum wealth and tax the wealthy. Or just understand that the gulf between the super-rich and everybody else has grown too extensive and can finally destroy our society.
“Cooperation in a Fragmented World” is definitely a worthwhile theme for this yr’s Davos. Our world is principally falling aside. Inflation has put no fewer than 1.7 billion workers worldwide at a monetary loss. Local weather change continues to ravage houses and communities. And social unrest is escalating in lots of locations as determined individuals grow to be more and more enthralled with self-serving misinformation campaigns performed by power-hungry authoritarian figures and big numbers of working-class residents voting for them in opposition to their very own finest pursuits.
Why has this all occurred? There are numerous solutions to this query, however the widespread denominator amongst all of them is that this: runaway excessive wealth and the failure on the a part of world leaders and governments to do something about it.
The world’s richest have by no means been richer–and there have by no means been so lots of them. Over the last decade, the variety of billionaires around the globe has greater than doubled and their mixed wealth has skyrocketed by at least $5.9 trillion.
For the reason that pandemic started, billionaires’ fortunes have elevated by roughly $2.7 billion a day. Right here at house in the U.S., there at the moment are 728 billionaires with a mixed fortune of $4.5 trillion. They’re a small subset of the 1,468,400 Individuals with property over $5 million who collectively are price a mixed $28.02 trillion. I’m within the latter group. I’m, by all regular requirements, a rich man. However at the same time as a type of, I nonetheless ask myself: how rich does one particular person should be? And why does somebody need or want a billion {dollars}?
This explosion in excessive wealth has contributed to just about all of our world’s most urgent issues. There may be now widespread evidence that the cost-of-living disaster has escalated due to blatant profiteering on the a part of ultra-rich company executives. Billionaires are destroying the planet as they flit around the globe on non-public jets to unique resorts like Davos and dump a million times more carbon into the environment than the common particular person within the course of. What number of houses, automobiles, boats, and jets (I’ve one) do we want? Authoritarian figures like Donald Trump within the U.S. and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil are in a position to conduct their harmful misinformation campaigns as a result of they’re bankrolled by like-minded, ultra-wealthy donors.
Our world is actually at an ecological, political, social, and ethical crossroads. However the worst half about all this fragmentation is that it didn’t must occur.
For years now, governments have did not rein in excessive wealth by, amongst different issues, instituting extra progressive tax techniques. We stay in a world the place none aside from Jeff Bezos, the fourth richest man on the planet, can get away with paying nothing in taxes whereas taking rides to space that emit more carbon into the environment than an individual among the many ranks of the world’s poorest will emit of their lifetime. In brief, our world leaders may have achieved one thing – one thing so simple as altering our tax insurance policies again to extra progressive ones – as a way to forestall our world from changing into as fragmented as it’s at present.
As certainly one of America’s 1,468,400 multi-millionaires, I’m genuinely involved in regards to the state of affairs on this planet at present. That’s the reason I joined over 200 of my friends from across the globe in signing a letter that calls upon the leaders attending Davos to lift our taxes.
At my very core, I’m a capitalist. I would like onerous work, innovation, and ingenuity to be handsomely rewarded, however I don’t need these rewards to be so exorbitant that they threaten the existence of the planet, contribute to the daily deaths of thousands, and spell the downfall of democracies.
I’m prepared and keen to cooperate in fixing our very fragmented world. The easiest way I can suppose how is to pay my justifiable share in taxes. I’m unsure what that’s, however I can guarantee you, it might imply paying greater than I pay at present. (No, I’m not going to easily write an even bigger test. That may be silly and wouldn’t repair the issue.)
Now, all that I ask is for the world leaders attending Davos to do their very own little bit of cooperating, honor my want, and save the planet and human society as we all know it from the brink of whole collapse.
Stephen Prince based Card Advertising and marketing Companies in 1993 and is vice-chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.
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