100+ Ultra-Rich People Warn Fellow Elites: 'It's Taxes or Pitchforks'

January 19, 2022

photo above: ( Plashing Vole / Flickr) (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

January 19, 2022

WN: Self-explanatory. If only . . .

The Book of James, Chapter 5, in the Bible speaks to this:

1Come now, you who are rich, weep and wail over the misery to come upon you. 2Your riches have rotted and moths have eaten your clothes. 3Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and consume your flesh like fire.

You have hoarded treasure in the last days. 4Look, the wages you withheld from the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.

5You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in the day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and murdered the righteous, who did not resist you.

My advice?: Pay your rightfully-due taxes! (Because the Bible tells you so.) 🙂

excerpts:

A group of more than 100 millionaires and billionaires on Wednesday presented fellow members of the global economic elite with a stark choice: “It’s taxes or pitchforks.”

In an open letter published amid the corporate-dominated virtual Davos summit, 102 rich individuals—including such prominent figures as Disney heiress Abigail Disney and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer—warned that “history paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like.”

“For all our well-being—rich and poor alike—it’s time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich.”

“For all our well-being—rich and poor alike—it’s time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich,” the letter reads. “Show the people of the world that you deserve their trust.”

The letter was released hours after an analysis conducted by the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies, Oxfam, and Patriotic Millionaires showed that a modest annual wealth tax targeting the world’s millionaires and billionaires would raise $2.52 trillion dollars a year, enough to lift billions of people out of poverty and vaccinate the world against Covid-19.

…

The letter—signed by rich individuals from Denmark, Germany, Austria, and other nations—continues:

Trust—in politics, in society, in one another—is not built in tiny side rooms only accessible by the very richest and most powerful. It’s not built by billionaire space travelers who make a fortune out of a pandemic but pay almost nothing in taxes and provide poor wages for their workers. Trust is built through accountability, through well-oiled, fair, and open democracies that provide good services and support all their citizens.

And the bedrock of a strong democracy is a fair tax system. A fair tax system.

As millionaires, we know that the current tax system is not fair. Most of us can say that, while the world has gone through an immense amount of suffering in the last two years, we have actually seen our wealth rise during the pandemic—yet few if any of us can honestly say that we pay our fair share in taxes.

This injustice baked into the foundation of the international tax system has created a colossal lack of trust between the people of the world and the elites who are the architects of this system…

To put it simply, restoring trust requires taxing the rich. The world—every country in it—must demand the rich pay their fair share. Tax us, the rich, and tax us now.

Made significantly worse by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, skyrocketing income and wealth inequality has been at the heart of recent mass protest movements in South America, the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere—grassroots uprisings that have frequently been met with brutal police repression.

“It’s time we right the wrongs of an unequal world.”