Taxing billionaires - not at all a bad idea!

Many a heart the world over is bleeding over the bloody political turmoil in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and quite rightly so, but how many of them will lend their support to this eminently sensible UN plan to tax billionaires to help feed the starving of the earth?

The stark and uncomfortable reality is that people in their millions have been sinking deeper and deeper into poverty while a microscopic minority among the world’s billions has been relentlessly amassing a profusion of wealth over the past couple of decades and entering what may be called the exclusive club of the world’s billionaires. This process has been generally glorified by the description ‘economic liberalization.’ We in Sri Lanka too fell for this slogan in the mid-seventies and opened our economy as never before to ‘market forces’ which have not quite delivered what was expected of them.

Be that as it may, no sooner the idea took hold on an unprecedented scale even among developing countries that neo-liberal economic policies need to be given a major try, a process of wealth accumulation began the world over, but, as could now be seen, this wealth has failed to trickle down to the masses of the world, to the desired degree. Unfortunately, even the more progressive sections of the world fell for those shrill slogans that helped in the heady liberalization of economies that were seen to be ‘closed.’

But the results are there for scrutiny and no one laying claim to a social conscience could find them to be flattering. At the end of three decades of the ‘market liberalization’ experiment, South Asia, to take just one example, still has the majority of the world’s poor. The region presents the unsettling spectacle of a phenomenal number of malnourished persons and South Asia has continued to be highly notable for this serious developmental drawback.

Economic grievances

Meanwhile, a considerable number of the lower middle classes and the working class of the West could be said to be making common cause with Arab Spring activists of the Middle East over festering and widespread economic grievances.

This is what the Wall Street Protests are all about. The top slogan of these activists is the pronouncement that they are the ‘ninety nine percent’ the process of wealth creation has left out or forgotten.

Therefore, the UN plan to impose a mere one percent tax on the wealth of each of the world’s billionaires, who at the moment number some 1,226, is an idea that merits deep consideration by the world community. It is estimated that this tax will help raise $ 46 billion in 2012 and this could help in alleviating some of the hardships of the world’s poor.

With this thought-provoking idea of taxing billionaires, the UN has brought to the centre of global attention the need for the world community to do something substantial about global poverty. It could also be considered an implicit admission that the international community’s global poverty alleviation efforts are not yielding the desired results.

Euro crisis

Thus, the UN is virtually revisiting the New International Economic Order concept which was unfurled with considerable trumpeting in the early seventies in the wake of the great ‘oil crunch’ but was allowed to slip out of global attention with the coming into vogue of the neo-economic liberalization regime.

Mass scale poverty is haunting the world and this factor is also at the heart of the Euro crisis which is marking the decline of the West, in economic and even political terms.

There is an umbilical link between the current mass scale poverty which is igniting social discontent the world over and the ongoing political turmoil in the Middle East. Despots are being shown the door and sections of the West, including those professing to champion Human Rights, are egging the rebels on.

But the supporters of these rebellions need to see that it is poverty eradication also, which would lay the firmest foundation for the establishment of democratic governance, accountable rule and the protection of Human Rights.

Something substantial and concrete must be done collectively by the world community about income inequalities and this is the moment to take on the issue when the UN is broaching it.