Wealth Tax, Young People on Social Media, Transphobia, Sinful Artists
According to Oxfam the wealth of the world's 10 richest individuals has risen by £400bn since the start of the pandemic. That sum could apparently vaccinate every adult on Earth, as well as restore to the world's poorest people the income they lost in 2020... It is hard to quarrel with the report's conclusion that current economic policies have enabled "a super-rich elite to amass wealth in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, while billions of people are struggling to make ends meet.
Political economists on both the left and the right are coming to the conclusion that the gap between rich and poor people is destabilising and dangerous to democracy...The world is getting less equal...
Vague Oxfam exhortations that we need to "shape more equal societies" are unlikely to get anywhere. Whatever Davos may pretend, the world does not have one government or one tax regime, let alone one ideology...
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| Duty Paid Ralph Hedley (1848-1913) Photo Credit:Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens [CC BY-NC] |
The world's most successful industries - largely the concern of the top 10 wealthy individuals - are still operating virtually tax-free. The reason at root is that these industries are global, while taxation is national. Tax regimes tend to be deeply conservative, continuing to undertax wealth, notably property, and overtax lower and middle incomes. Fiscal authorities, such as Britain, are also cynically indulgent towards tax avoidance and money laundering, while loading taxpayers with regressive imposts such as council tax and VAT...
It is for governments to try to track down and police those who, far from not paying enough tax, pay little or none at all. They grow rich by keeping their wealth offshore...
There are three possible answers to the question of how to increase the contribution of the super-rich:shrug, shame or tax . Shrug is easy. It has ruled policy in Britain ever since the days of 80% surtax ended in the 1980s. Shame is dubious...
As for higher personal taxes, Oxfam argues that if Argentina can levy a one-off emergency surtax on its 12,000 richest citizens, so surely can the richer countries of the world...A surtax must be the answer.
(Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, 2021)
(See Wealth Gap, Jan 22, Taxing Millionaires, Jan 15 and Tax Rises, Oct 6, 2020)
*A one-off tax on Argentina's richest people comes into effect to help pay for medical supplies and relief for businesses struggling due to Covid-19.
Those with assets of more than 200 million pesos ($2.3m; £1.67m) will have to pay about 3% on assets declared within the country and over 5% on assets held abroad.
It will apply to around 12,000 people.
The government hopes to raise around $3bn. The money will also help fund scholarships and social aid.
Senators passed the one-off levy - dubbed the "millionaires' tax" - by 42 votes to 26 in December.
The measure brought in by centre-left President Alberto Fernandez has been criticised by the opposition which described it as "confiscatory".
There have also been concerns raised by the Argentine Rural Society that the tax could be made permanent.
But the country has been badly hit by the pandemic, which has deepened already high rates of poverty. Almost 40% of the country's population lives under the poverty line, while the unemployment rate sits at 11%.
Oxfam's annual report on economic inequality said Argentina was showing the way towards progressive taxation of the rich as the key to an equitable recovery from the current crisis.
"A tax on the excess profits earned by corporations during the coronavirus pandemic could generate $104 billion - enough to provide unemployment protection for all workers, and financial support for all children and elderly people in the poorest countries," the report stated.
Argentina has almost two million confirmed cases and more than 47,000 deaths from the virus.
(BBC News, Latin America, 2021)
*Sir, Paul Johnson's article made some good points about simplifying and reforming the tax system to assist in raising the revenue to help to repair the nation's finances. However, he avoided touching on one particularly sensitive point: that the basic rate of income tax used to be 25 per cent. The governments of John Major and subsequently Gordon Brown reduced the rate to 20 per cent while failing to recognise the future cost of an ageing population and healthcare needs. If we want to afford the level of public services that people demand then taxes on all incomes surely need to be raised, perhaps with an increase in the personal allowance to ensure that the poorest in society are unaffected.
(DJB Shearer, Glasgow, The Times, 2021)
*The revelation last week that the 25 richest US billionaires have paid very little tax even as their fortunes have soared has reignited demands for wealth taxes on both sides of the Atlantic...
Jeff Bezos - founder of Amazon and world's richest person, with a $193bn (£136bn) fortune - paid no federal taxes in 2011 and even claimed $4,000 in tax credit for his children.
The second wealthiest person - the head of Tesla, Elon Musk - paid no tax in 2018 because he took out vast loans against his shareholdings and deducted the interest costs he paid on the loans from his taxes.
Warren Buffet, the famed investor who has pointed out that he pays less tax than his secretary and called for reform of the system, paid an effective tax rate of just 0.1% between 2014 and 2018.
"It may sound shocking," says Arun Avani - assistant professor at the University of Warwick's economics department... "but all of this is perfectly legal, and not surprising to anyone who has spent any time thinking about the wealthy and tax"...
"The scandal here isn't that they broke the rules - they didn't. It's that the rules are so bad." ...
Robert Palmer, executive director of the campaign group Tax Justice UK, says: "The richest British people will be using exactly the techniques exposed in the ProPublica leaks. If you're an ordinary person you can't do that, as tax comes out of your monthly pay cheque. This is deeply unfair."...
Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of very rich people campaigning for higher taxes to be applied to them and other members of the elite, says the report shows that the rich can "basically choose whether to pay taxes or not."
"As a millionaire, I know personally that our economy enshrines wealth for the few - to the detriment of ordinary people in our country"...
(Rupert Neate, The Observer, 2021)
A scandal that never goes away because of the inaction of those in power.
Some Young People on Social Media
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| Music-Making Angels Italian (Genoese) School Photo Credit: Tabley House Collection [CC BY-NC] |
The author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a detailed essay about the conduct of young people on social media "who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion" and who she says are part of a generation "so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow."...
In her essay, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun said she noticed in certain young people "a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not."
They had, she added: "an astonishing level of self-absorption" as well as "an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all".
On social media she said many were: "obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy". There was, in this world view, no room for nuance or complexity. Ask a question and "you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra"...
"I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and reread their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene."
(Alison Flood, The Guardian, 2021)
To think, to learn, to grow as an individual - doesn't that mean that there will be times when your views will not align with those of your family, friends or acquaintances? Shouldn't the "prevailing ideological orthodoxy", in whatever sphere, be challenged, questioned and debated?
Transphobia
The Royal Academy has barred an artist's work from its shop after a social media campaign claimed that she had negative attitudes towards transgender people.
The academy said that it would no longer stock works by Jess de Wahls. It thanked campaigners for bringing to its attention "an item in the RA shop by an artist representing transphobic views."
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| St John the Baptist Michelangelo Marisi da Carravagio (1571-1610) (copy after) Photo Credit:Bolton Library and Museum Services [CC BY-NC-ND] |
The institution was widely criticised yesterday. It was asked if it would stop promoting the work of artists such as Eric Gill, who sexually abused his daughters, and Caravaggio, the 17th-century Roman painter who fled to Naples after being sentenced to death for murder...
De Wahls appears to have been singled out for an essay explaining her position on "gender identity ideology". She wrote in 2019 that she had "no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex". She could not, however, "accept people's unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such"...
The artist... has described how she received a "flood of hate mail" after the essay was published. She said: "The name-calling and general vibe of a modern-day witch-hunt was palpable."...
(David Sanderson, The Times, 2021)
What nonsense is this that so called "transphobic views" can lead to the barring of an artist's work from the Royal Academy's shop? Then a few days later.
*The Royal Academy of Arts has apologised to an artist whose work was removed from its gift shop after it branded her views transphobic. The RA called its initial decision a "betrayal" of its commitment to freedom of speech...
In a statement the RA said it had mishandled the situation and that its internal communications had failed, leading to De Wahls hearing about the decision via social media.
The statement read: "We should have handled this better. We have apologised to Jess de Wahls for the way we have treated her and do so again publicly now. We had no right to judge her views on our social media.
"This betrayed our most important core value - the protection of free speech. Plurality of voices, tolerance and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect."..
De Wahls told the Guardian her work would now go back on sale. She welcomed the apology."I think it's important for an institution like that to stay out of these things. I hope all the other institutions are watching, and learn a lesson. I hope this brings it back to a place where disagreement can happen without assuming hate."
(Lanre Bakare, The Guardian, 2021)
Sinful Artists
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Madonna and Child, Eric Gill (1882-1940) Photo Credit: Glastonbury Abbey [CC BY-NC] |
…In Leaving Neverland, Dan Read’s new documentary about the singer Michael Jackson’s relationship with young boys…The question is: what do we do with the knowledge? The fashion today is to dissociate not just from the person of the artist but from the art itself.
…If there is to be a rule, then mine would be to condemn the sin but to applaud the art.
(David Aaronovitch, The Times, 2019)
By the same token it surely makes no sense for charitable and other institutions to reject or return donations from dubious sources. The quality of the donation resides in the good it can do, not in the probity of the donor.
(Richard Overton, Bridgewater, Somerset, The Times, 2019)
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