For 50 years, the economic forum held in Davos has brought together world leaders and owners of the largest fortunes to analyze global problems.
This time, inflation, the slowdown of the economy, the risk of artificial intelligence, increased social tensions, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Palestine, warming and climate disasters.
As has been happening in recent years, proposals also arise outside the agenda and even against the spirit of the summit.
That is the case of a group of more than 250 businessmen and billionaires
who, in a letter published in the last few hours,
asked to be charged more taxes for being "extremely" rich
and thus be able to reduce social inequality.
"Our request is simple: we ask that you tax the richest in society; this will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm the economic growth of our nations. But it will make the extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future," they point out in their message.
This is the proposal
"Proud to pay more" ("Proud to pay more"
in Spanish) that they announced during the 54th edition of the Davos Forum.
The idea is that politicians introduce more taxes on wealth, an initiative that contrasts with Javier Milei's questioning of taxes and Western leaders in Switzerland yesterday, whom he accused of turning to "socialism" and asked them to "not yield to the State"
Among the wealthy signatories from 17 countries are
Disney heiress
Abigail Disney;
Brian Cox, who played fictional billionaire Logan Roy in "Succession
";
actor and screenwriter Simon Pegg;
Valerie Rockefeller, heiress to the American dynasty;
and Morris Pearl, a former Blackrock executive.
The list includes investors and philanthropists from the United States, England, Canada, Germany, Austria, Denmark and Greenland.
“We are also the people who benefit most from the status quo, but inequality
has reached a tipping point,
and its cost to our economic, social and ecological stability is serious, and increases every day.
In short, we need to act now,” they say in the letter they tried to deliver on Wednesday to world leaders meeting in Davos.
The curious campaign is promoted by "
Tax Me Now" and "Patriotic Millionaires",
an organization founded in 2010 that rejected tax cuts for the rich by former US President George W. Bush, promoted Tax Day in 2012 together with former President Barack Obama and promoted the signing of the decree to raise the salaries of federal public employees in that country in 2014.
Now, the organization conducted a survey to analyze the thinking of 2,300 millionaires over 18 years of age, with a capital of more than a million dollars within the G20.
According to the results,
74% support increasing taxes on their wealth, 58% support the introduction of a 2% tax on the wealth
of people with capital greater than US$ 10 million and 54% think that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.
They also make a mention of Argentina: in a box showing the percentage of the population with more than 1 million dollars in the G20 countries, Argentina appears with 0.20%, above India and Indonesia, although below the rest.
The report cites a paper by Oxfman titled "Survival of the Richest" that estimates that for every dollar collected in taxes in the world, only four cents come from wealth taxes.
According to an Oxfam report published in the context of the Davos forum, the five
richest men in the world have more than doubled their fortune since 2020, increasing from US$405 billion to US$869 billion in 2023.