tax the rich

The Climate Finance Plan Leaders Won’t Consider at COP29? Tax the Rich

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Original article by Sam Pizzigati republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Activists gather with banners, including one that reads: “Pay Up,” outside the plenary halls to voice their demands for a variety of climate-related issues, including labour rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, loss and damage financing, and the expulsion of fossil fuel lobbyists from the conference on day six at the UNFCCC COP29 Climate Conference on November 16, 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A global 2% annual tax on billionaire wealth could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.

The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change—COP29 for short—in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku.

But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport, news reports note, have just doubled.

What makes that such a big deal? Practically nothing symbolizes wanton disregard for our Earth’s environment more dramatically than private jet travel. A corporate executive taking a single long-haul private jet flight, points out the Travel Smart Campaign’s Denise Auclair, “will burn more CO2 than several normal people do in an entire year.”

Instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.

Researchers at Oxfam have just gone through the flight records of 23 global billionaires. Those airborne souls averaged 184 private jet flights each over a recent single year. They each essentially circumnavigated the globe 10 times over. Their flights averaged 2,074 tons of carbon emissions, an outlay an average person globally would take 300 years to emit.

Extravagances like private jets help explain why global carbon emissions last year expanded by 1.3%. To get climate anywhere near under control, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted on the eve of this month’s COP29 extravaganza, the world’s nations ought to be reducing carbon emissions by at least 9% a year.

“The world is still underestimating climate risks,” Guterres added. “It’s absolutely essential to reduce emissions drastically now.”

And that reducing will only unfold, the U.N. secretary-general emphasized in his COP29 opening remarks, if the world’s nations address the pivotal contribution to climate catastrophe that our world’s wealthiest are making.

“The rich cause the problem,” as Guterres explained, “the poor pay the highest price.”

Observers have tagged this year’s global environmental gathering the “climate finance COP.” The key question before all the official government delegates gathered in Baku: Who will actually pay the bill for addressing the climate change crisis?

Back in 2009, national delegations to that year’s COP gathering pledged to raise an overall annual $100 billion over the next 15 years. The world’s nations have since then met that target only once. Any new annual target for the next 15 years, most researchers and activists agree, needs to run considerably higher, anywhere from $500 billion to $5 trillion higher.

No one can reasonably expect governments alone, COP principals from rich nations counter, to come up with anywhere near that level of support. These rich-nation COP delegations want to encourage private investors to get more involved in financing new climate initiatives.

In other words, instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.

Nations rich with fossil fuels most heartily agree. The “onus” for financing moves to counter the climate crisis, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev from Azerbaijan is arguing, “cannot fall entirely on government purses.”

Our globe’s richest nations would also like to expand the trading of “carbon credits,” transactions that let wealthy developed nations delay making costly emissions cuts at home by underwriting much less costly climate actions in poor nations.

But the offset projects that developed nations underwrite, The Guardiannotes, have regularly overpromised and underdelivered, leaving “wildfires burning through forests that were supposed to be protected and emissions from renewable energy projects being counted on balance books even though they would probably have been built anyway.”

This year’s CO29 conference will wrap up on November 22, and no serious climate change analyst is predicting any consensus that could significantly slow our globe’s ever more perilous progress to climate collapse. Developed nations, Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff observes, remain “loath to pitch in more than $100 billion a year.”

“Transitioning the world to clean energy alone,” counters Gongloff, could actually cost $215 trillion by 2050.

How could the world make real progress toward those trillions? Guardian environmental editor Fiona Harvey earlier this week ran down some promising options.

Nations could for starters, Harvey notes, put a serious tax bite on the “unprecedented” profit bonanza that fossil fuel companies have enjoyed ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Those companies have pocketed well over a quarter-trillion dollars in profits in the two years since.

Nations could also place new taxes on the jet flights our richest so enjoy or move to end the more than $650 billion spent annually in the developing world on subsidies for fossil fuels and polluting industries. Better yet, in a world where our five richest billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2020, we could adopt the 2% annual tax on billionaire wealth that Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has proposed.

A global tax along that line could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.

The only sure thing about initiatives like these: No proposals that could make a real climate difference will get any serious attention at COP29, as the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, observed in his brief and biting remarks to conference-goers. Rama opened his address to COP29 by noting that he had decided to ditch his prepared remarks after spending some time in the conference’s leaders lounge.

The global notables in that lounge, Rama continued, had all gathered to “eat, drink, meet, and take photos together, while images of voiceless speeches from leaders play on and on and on in the background.”

“To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day,” he went on to explain. “Life goes on with its old habits, and our speeches, filled with good words about fighting climate change, change nothing.”

Concluded Rama, a former artist and the current chair of his nation’s Socialist Party: “What on Earth are we doing in this gathering, over and over and over, if there is no common political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?”

That inaction—in the face of overwhelming global public support for greater pro-climate action—continues to comfort our world’s most fantastically wealthy.

Original article by Sam Pizzigati republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingThe Climate Finance Plan Leaders Won’t Consider at COP29? Tax the Rich

Tax Dodging by Super-Rich, Big Corporations Costs Nations Half a Trillion Per Year: Study

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A crowd of demonstrators marches in Saint-Brieuc, France on May 1, 2024. (Photo: Emmanuelle Pays/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)

“The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system,” said the chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.

A study published Tuesday estimates that tax dodging enabled by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy nations is costing countries around the world nearly half a trillion dollars in revenue each year, underscoring the urgent need for global reforms to prevent rich individuals and large corporations from shirking their obligations.

The new study, conducted by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), finds that “the combined costs of cross-border tax abuse by multinational companies and by individuals with undeclared assets offshore stands at an estimated $492 billion.” Of that total in lost revenue, corporate tax dodging is responsible for more than $347 billion, according to TJN’s calculations.

“For people everywhere, the losses translate into foregone public services, and weakened states at greater risk of falling prey to political extremism,” the study reads. “And in the same way, there is scope for all to benefit from moving tax rule-setting out of the OECD and into a globally inclusive and fully transparent process at the United Nations.”

The analysis estimates that just eight countries—the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—are enabling large-scale tax avoidance by opposing popular global reform efforts. Late last year, those same eight countries were the lonely opponents of the United Nations General Assembly’s vote to set in motion the process of establishing a U.N. tax convention.

According to the new TJN study, those eight countries are responsible for roughly half of the $492 billion lost per year globally to tax avoidance by the rich and large multinational corporations, despite being home to just 8% of the world’s population.

“The hurtful eight voted for a world where we all keep losing half a trillion a year to tax-cheating multinational corporations and the super-rich,” Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, said in a statement Tuesday. “The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system, and their people consistently demand an end to tax abuse, so it’s absurd that the U.S. and U.K. are seeking to preserve it.”

“It’s perhaps harder to understand why the other handful of blockers, like Australia, Canada, and Japan, who don’t play anything like such a damaging role, would be willing to go along with this,” Cobham added.

https://twitter.com/TaxJusticeNet/status/1858880408357888306?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1858880408357888306%7Ctwgr%5E212231be390df1278a214d4c3357d2bb5ea63942%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fglobal-tax-dodging

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TJN released its study as G20 nations—a group that includes most of the “hurtful eight”—issued a communiqué pledging to “engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” Brazil, which hosted the G20 summit, led the push for language calling for taxation of the global super-rich.

The document drew praise from advocacy groups including the Fight Inequality Alliance, which stressed the need to “transform the rhetoric on taxing the rich into global reality.”

The communiqué was released amid concerns that the election of far-right billionaire Donald Trump in the U.S. could derail progress toward a global solution to pervasive and costly tax avoidance.

The new TJN study cites Trump’s pledge to cut the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% and warns such a move would accelerate the global “race to the bottom” on corporate taxation.

“People in countries around the world are calling in large majorities on their governments to tax multinational corporations properly,” Liz Nelson, TJN’s director of advocacy and research, said Tuesday. “But governments continue to exercise a policy of appeasement on corporate tax.”

“We now have data from these governments showing that when they asked multinational corporations to pay less tax, the corporations cheated even more,” Nelson added. “It’s time governments found the spines their people deserve from their leaders.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingTax Dodging by Super-Rich, Big Corporations Costs Nations Half a Trillion Per Year: Study

Morning Star: The good, the bad and the ugly in the Labour Budget

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-good-bad-and-ugly-labour-budget

Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.
Keir Starmer says pensioners can freeze to death and poor children can starve and be condemned to failure and misery all their lives.

…

So-called austerity is best understood as a massive transfer of wealth — from public to private, from the many to the few, as the fortunes of the super-rich ballooned while Britain endured the longest wage squeeze since the Napoleonic wars.

This is a grotesquely unequal country in which big banks and energy giants post the largest profits in their history, in which the richest 1 per cent own more than the poorer 70 per cent of the population put together, in which millions rely on foodbanks while the number of billionaires increased by a fifth during the Covid crisis alone.

When Reeves gives with one hand and takes away with the other — as PCS leader Fran Heathcote notes she does by offering a 1.7 per cent increase in departmental spending, while setting a 2 per cent savings target for those same departments — she cites pressure on the public finances that could be relieved easily through higher corporation tax, a financial transactions tax or a wealth tax. As Unite’s Sharon Graham notes, a 1 per cent tax on the richest 1 per cent would raise £25 billion, filling the so-called “black hole” in the budget at a stroke.

It is a choice to keep children in poverty with the two-child benefit cap, to pick pensioners’ pockets with the winter fuel payment cut and to continue Tory “reform” of the work capability assessment — estimated to cost over 400,000 people with mobility or mental health problems over £400 a month.

It is a choice to echo Tory hysteria over benefit fraud, when the amount lost to this is less than goes unclaimed in social security payments people are entitled to. Giving the Department for Work & Pensions power to remove money directly from bank accounts will likely increase non-take-up of benefits by people who need them but understandably fear their personal finances being exposed in this way.

And it’s a choice to hike the cost of a bus ticket by 50 per cent while maintaining a fuel duty freeze — when governments across Europe are making public transport cheaper because it is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-good-bad-and-ugly-labour-budget

Continue ReadingMorning Star: The good, the bad and the ugly in the Labour Budget

Temporary tax on the super-rich could raise £130bn for green schemes, Greenpeace says

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Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/temporary-tax-super-rich-could-raise-ps130bn-green-schemes-greenpeace-says

Funds could insulate all draughty homes, fund free bus travel, and retrain millions of workers for a green future

A TEMPORARY tax on the super-rich could generate enough money to fix every poorly insulated home, fund free bus travel and retrain three million workers in green industries, Greenpeace revealed today.

A new report commissioned by the climate group proposes introducing an annual 2.5 per cent tax on all individual wealth above £10 million over the next five years.

This “national renewal tax” would impact less than 75,000 people — 0.1 per cent of the population — and raise up to £183 billion for the Treasury.

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An analysis by Oxfam found that the richest 1 per cent emit as much carbon as two-thirds of all humanity.

Greenpeace UK’s climate campaigner Georgia Whitaker said: “The oversized carbon footprint of the super-rich is a clear rationale for ensuring that they play an oversized role in fixing the crisis that they have an oversized role in creating.

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Patriotic Millionaires member Julia Davies, who wrote the report’s foreword, said: “This report highlights that a small, temporary tax on our wealth could transform the lives of millions, while tackling the greatest threat humanity has ever faced — the climate crisis — all while investing in a strong forward-facing economy with quality stable jobs for the British people.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/temporary-tax-super-rich-could-raise-ps130bn-green-schemes-greenpeace-says

Continue ReadingTemporary tax on the super-rich could raise £130bn for green schemes, Greenpeace says