A group of 83 millionaires on Monday called for higher taxes on the world's wealthiest "immediately" and "permanently" to help "cure the world".
The Covid-19 pandemic, which has already officially affected nearly 13 million people on the planet and led to the deaths of more than 570,000 of them, according to the data from Johns Hopkins University, has led to a historic recession across the world.
And for good reason, the economy, for several weeks, has indeed remained at a standstill. Governments are now spending billions in an effort to restart the machine.
According to the OECD, the decline in global gross domestic product should indeed reach at least 6% this year, and 7.6% in the event of a second epidemic wave , while the expected rebound for 2021 would be 5.2% without a return of the coronavirus, and 2.8% with.
In view of the economic situation of the planet, a group of 83 millionaires is today calling for greater taxation of the richest:"As the Covid-19 strikes the world, millionaires like us have a vital role to play in healing the world" , reads an open letter published ahead of the G20 finance ministers meeting and the extraordinary EU recovery summit this week.
Signatories include the co-founder of American ice cream giant Ben &Jerry’s , Jerry Greenfield, or the British Richard Curtis, director of Love at first sight in Notting Hill (1999) or from Love actually (2003). No French fortune seems – for the moment at least – to have participated in the initiative.
“We are not the ones tending to the sick in intensive care units. We do not drive the ambulances that bring the sick to the hospital. We're not the ones restocking grocery shelves or delivering food door to door e, can we read again, still writes this group which calls itself Millionaires for Humanity, on an eponymous website.
“But we have money, lots of it. And we absolutely need the money now and we will continue to need it for years to come to recover from the crisis, the impact of which will "last for decades and could "push half a billion people into poverty “.
Through this letter, the signatories call on "governments to raise taxes on people like us." Immediately, substantially and permanently “.
