G20, endorse a tax on the world's ultra-rich to feed the world's starving

Mail & Guardian

a day ago

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. A 0.3% tax would generate enough to secure life's necessities for many tens of millions of the world's most vulnerable. Photo: File
As host of this year's G20 Summit, South Africa could help end one of the greatest injustices in the world today — the cavernous gaps in wealth and in access to life's basic necessities. Most acutely, people living through humanitarian crises are dying for want of food and medicines because funding for aid agencies is wholly insufficient. Yet, our world is awash in wealth.
Nobel Peace Laureate and former World Food Programme executive director David Beasley
The G20 summit scheduled for
This shortfall translates into food rations being cut to well below minimum daily human requirements, which can lead to people '
Those suffering are invariably among the world poorest and most vulnerable people — people who have survived genocide and mass atrocities in
Governments have moral and human rights obligations to increase their funding, but between a highly parochial, ill-conceived 'America First' US foreign policy, pressures to vastly increase defense spending in Europe, and economic uncertainty, even a return to recent levels of funding — themselves inadequate — are remote.
It would be wrong to yield to this unconscionable reality. If governments refuse to fund humanitarian needs, they must find another way. There could hardly be a fairer way than asking the world's richest people to give a sliver of their wealth to save their lives and restore the dignity of the world's poorest people.
The G20, whose members are home to the overwhelming majority of the world's billionaires, would be the natural forum for nurturing a humanitarian assistance tax into existence. At last year's Summit in Brazil, G20 leaders
Using strategies not available to a typical taxpayer, the ultra-rich are able to earn vast fortunes that go virtually untaxed. Billionaires pay an effective tax rate equivalent to
To compensate, a
This tax scheme
The world now has slightly more than
On average, billionaires enjoy a 7.5% annual pre-tax wealth increase (after inflation). With a minimum effective tax of 2% of their wealth in place, these super rich individuals would see their wealth increase by 5.5% year-on-year — $55 million for every $1 billion of wealth. That leaves plenty of room for them to continue to significantly increase their wealth while also paying a small humanitarian assistance surcharge.
And even a small tax for humanitarian assistance could make an enormous difference. A tax equivalent to 0.2% of ultra-high-net-worth individuals' wealth and applied to all current billionaires worldwide would raise $23.5-29.4 billion. Increase the tax to 0.3% and include centi-millionaires, and it would raise at least $52.9 billion. That exceeds this year's UN appeal and would also encompass much or all of a separate, partially overlapping
Consider the world's worst displacement crisis, Sudan, with
It doesn't have to be this way. If higher-income governments refuse to meet their responsibilities through regular budget processes, then they should meet them by imposing a humanitarian wealth tax. It is not too much to ask that the super-rich pay their fair share so that the world's most disadvantaged people can live with the dignity due every human being.
Human dignity is the first right listed in South Africa's Constitution. By pushing the G20 to endorse a humanitarian assistance tax on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, South Africa can breathe life into its highest value and share it with the world.
Eric A Friedman is the global health justice scholar at the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC.
Lawrence O Gostin is a distinguished university professor and founding O'Neill Chair in Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and co-faculty director of the O'Neill Institute.