By Khanyi Mlaba
January 19, 2023
You can’t flick on the news, scroll through your Twitter timeline, or talk to your overly money-conscious dad in 2023 without coming across the words “inflation”, “cost-of-living”, or “recession.”
It’s bleak, but it’s how the year is starting off and it’s how it’s predicted to continue. While most of the world has to grit their teeth and buckle down for a bumpy financial year, Oxfam has revealed that the wealthiest 1% won’t feel it — more than that, according to the organization, their profits are part of the problem.
Every year, Oxfam releases a wealth inequality report in mid-January to coincide with the global decision-making that takes place at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. This year’s report is titled: Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality.
Aptly titled, it takes a deep dive into the underregulated tax policies that have allowed the world’s wealthiest to pocket significantly large profits, even while global poverty levels have increased for the first time in 25 years.
Oxfam is calling for the wealthiest to be taxed on their income, inheritance, and profits, highlighting the unfairness of the richest having to pay minimal taxes, while the working class and small business entrepreneurs
have staggeringly high taxes to contribute. The report makes the example that billionaire Elon Musk paid just over 3% in taxes from 2014 to 2018; while an entrepreneur in Northern Uganda, who makes an estimated $80 a month in profit, pays a tax rate of 40%.
“Taxes on the richest in wealthier nations could also raise revenue to help their governments live up to existing aid and climate finance commitments, and to deliver much-needed additional investment to fight poverty, inequality, climate change, and humanitarian crises,” Oxfam argues in the report.
The call is not a new one, it’s been an ongoing discussion for a while now. In fact, even the rich are calling for themselves to be taxed more.
In January last year, over 100 millionaires signed a letter calling for their taxes to be higher. It’s happening again now — 205 of the world’s “ultra rich” including Avenger Mark Ruffalo, have raised their voices at the World Economic Forum meeting, calling for governments to introduce wealth taxes to help reduce global inequality.
