Take My Money. Please!

With even Britain's Labour Party avowing no new taxes on the wealthy, it is refreshing when one reads about people of means asking to be taxed more. In the United States, it is the billionaire Warren Buffett who clamours for fair taxation. His Buffett Rule came to prominence when he

publicly stated in early 2011 that he believed it was wrong that rich people, like himself, could pay less in federal taxes, as a portion of income, than the middle class, and voiced support for increased income taxes on the wealthy.

Regrettably, there is little such appetite in Canada, where that kind of talk is met with dire warnings of doom, the myth being that we are overtaxed. No one wants to impose penury on the wealthy, since they already do so much for us, eh? However, one individual is piercing the 'party line'. Claire Trottier writes:

Despite being part of the 1 per cent myself, ... we’re not addressing the underpinning factors that are accelerating the concentration of wealth and power into an ever shrinking percentage of individuals.

The solution is right in front of us: we need to tax me and people like me more and that means taxing wealth. 

She points out that the gap between the very rich and the rest of us is widening.

Canada’s roughly 50 billionaires have seen a 51 per cent increase in their wealth since the beginning of COVID and have more assets than the bottom 40 per cent of Canadian households combined. And it’s getting worse, as hugely disproportionate sums of wealth created in the last 10 years have gone to the top 1 per cent while the bottom 50 per cent have gotten practically nothing.

Given the crises in housing, food prices, general affordability and the climate, Trottier wants to see some changes. 

 I am one of over 250 millionaires who signed an open letter presented at the World Economic Forum at Davos saying that we would be proud to pay more tax in the form of a wealth tax. 

Polls show that a majority of Canadians support the idea of a wealth tax. 

All of society would benefit from a wealth tax. I’m not interested in being a rich person in a poor country. I want to live in a society where everyone can live a dignified life today and where we can mitigate the devastating impacts of climate change in the future.

Unfortunately, as I tried to point out in my previous post, the biggest impediment to fair taxation seems to be our government and the titans it chooses to fawn over and listen to. Until that changes, expect the gap between the rich and the poor, and its attendant policy failures, to continue apace.

 

 

 

The Haves Certainly Have It

This from today's Letters To The Editor, to which I have nothing to add:

Re: Two richest men as wealthy as poorest 30 per cent, Jan. 16

It is telling that this news report was not a front-page headline in the Star.

As if the world needed any more data on the abject failure of capitalism and the neoliberal free market experiment, Oxfam has released yet another report once again documenting the egregious and unconscionable wealth of a minuscule number of individuals in Canada and around the world.

Report after report has documented the skyrocketing expansion of inequality around the globe and the inexorable march of wealth to the top of the social ladder. If capitalism were a new drug being developed to cure cancer and it failed in all but a few cases out of billions it would be abandoned immediately but we continue to prescribe the economic thalidomide of capitalism to the world’s population without remorse.

However, despite this overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence, the world media, economists and politicians seem blasé regarding its dismal and destabilizing failures and the deep and comprehensive reforms that are needed to ensure that global wealth is shared equitably. There are no front-page hue-and-cry headlines calling this an economic crisis or extended coverage of this issue on the news channels. This gross status quo inequality seems to be accepted and normalized as an inherent part of capitalism that cannot be changed.

In fact, with the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the American public has decided to firmly put on its rose-coloured glasses and double-down on the neoliberal nightmare of “cancer capitalism.”

Despite this political St. Vitas Dance, there is a desperate need for a government regulated, moderated and managed economic system that is actively structured to serve the needs of all in society as the historian and economist Karl Polanyi asserted. Such a system places clear limits on wealth accumulation and claws back excess wealth and profits through progressive taxation.

If we were smart enough to invent capitalism, we are smart enough to invent its replacement.

It is time to radically change our global economic system to serve the needs of humanity, not a few humans.

Robert Bahlieda, Newmarket

Do you find it amusing that we the public anxiously follow the media to be aware of the daily interaction between nations, cultures, religions, terrorists, politics and, oh yes, economies? Such a multitude of players in mankind’s unfolding history and future.

But perhaps there’s really only 16 – based upon the knowledge (and fact) that eight men own half the world’s wealth. Perhaps there are 16 players served by millions who accommodate them for reward while billions of others live in war and death and poverty and the rest of us are relegated to being blocks of pieces on an endless series of game boards that lead to millions of winners and billions of losers — just sayin’, perhaps.

But history says nations fade as empires rise. And our supposed representatives in governments are silenced by their parties who serve the players and their accommodators. Global democracy with globalization is sadly our “paradise lost” because globalization without global democracy is the globalization of poverty.

Ask yourself this. When it comes to big banks, big business, big oil, big money (non-pursuit of offshore accounts) and big talk, is Justin Trudeau really that much different than Stephen Harper?

Randy Gostlin, Oshawa