Desmond, Matthew. Poverty, by America. 1st ed. New York: Crown, 2023. https://amzn.to/40Aqzlp

Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:eefd847a2a1723651d1d863de5153292

Alternate annotation link: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3Aeefd847a2a1723651d1d863de5153292

• for: inequality, wealth tax, climate justice, earth system justice
• policy paper
• title
  • Survival of the Richest
• source
  • Oxfam

• date

  • Jan 2023

• Executive Summary

  • Since 2020, the richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth
    • nearly twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population.
  • Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7bn a day,
    • even as inflation outpaces the wages of at least 1.7 billion workers, more than the population of India.7
  • Food and energy companies more than doubled their profits in 2022,
    • paying out $257bn to wealthy shareholders,
    • while over 800 million people went to bed hungry
  • Only 4 cents in every dollar of tax revenue comes from wealth taxes and
    • half the world’s billionaires live in countries with no inheritance tax on money they give to their children.
  • A tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires could raise $1.7 trillion a year,
    • enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty, and fund a global plan to end hunger.

See especially P. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Ample evidence has shown that increasing taxes in Western countries along with the states' power to use it during the majority of the 1900s not only reduced inequalities but encouraged growth.

Chappell, B. (2022, January 13). Quebec’s “unvaxxed tax” has people rushing to get vaccinated. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072775645/quebec-covid-19-unvaccinated-tax

Is mandatory COVID vaccination legal? Here’s what Canada’s charter says. (n.d.). Calgaryherald. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/is-mandatory-covid-19-vaccination-constitutional

Great quote by itself.

How useful is the statute of limitations in cases like slavery in America? It goes against a broader law of humanity, but by pretending there was a statue of limitations for going against it, we have only helped to institutionalize racism in American society. The massive lack of a level playing field makes it all the harder for the marginalized to have the same freedoms as everyone else.

Perhaps this is why the idea of reparations is so powerful for so many. It removes the statue of limitations and may make it possible to allow us to actually level the playing field.

Related:

Luke 12:48 states, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Is this simply a statement for justifying greater taxes for the massively wealth?

Is the fact that these exist a function of how quiet and unknown these can be within a small subset of select society? Because the're not more common or commonly known, the average person isn't aware (not helped by the complexity of the details) on a daily basis and thus they can continue on helped by politicians in power who can be lobbied (or otherwise captured).

FitzRoy. F., Jin. J., (2020). Reforming Tax and Welfare: Social Justice and Recovery after the Pandemic. Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved from: https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/pp157/

Not sure how accurate this characterization is, but it does seem that Intuit has been lobbying to keep things less than straightforward for taxpayers for some time. Unfortunate. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-these-taxprep-companies-lobby-hard-to-keep-tax-day-a-torture-for-you-20150414-column.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboTax (see controversies)