The Warehouse Group founder Sir Stephen Tindall and Hire Things founder Peter Torr Smith are two of 174 millionaires to have signed the document so far.

The open letter said: "Today, we, the undersigned millionaires, ask our governments to raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently."

The letter says as Covid-19 strikes the world, millionaires have a critical role to play.

"So please. Tax us. Tax us. Tax us. It is the right choice. It is the only choice."

"No, we are not the ones caring for the sick in intensive care wards. We are not driving the ambulances that will bring the ill to hospitals. We are not restocking grocery store shelves or delivering food door to door."

"But we do have money, lots of it. Money that is desperately needed now and will continue to be needed in the future."

It goes on to stress that the pandemic crisis cannot be solved with charity alone - no matter how generous people around the world were.

They say it was the responsibility of governments and world leaders to raise the funds needed and to go onto spend and spread those funds out equally and fairly.

Statistics NZ in 2018 said while the wealthiest 20 per cent had seen their fortunes skyrocket, the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of Kiwis hadn't changed in years.

An Oxfam report, in 2018, found one per cent of New Zealanders own 28 per cent of new wealth generated the previous year - while the poorest 30 percent only got one percent of it.

Last month, the Green Party unveiled a Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) policy designed to address this inequality, which would be paid for by increasing taxes on the very wealthiest members of society.

They say it would raise $7.9 billion in its first year, "covering the GMI's costs."

The plan has been widely admonished, with members of National and ACT labelling it an "envy tax" and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern saying it makes "fairly heroic assumptions."

Read the letter "Millionaires for Humanity."

Source

• newshub.co.nz
• stuff.co.nz
• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: newshub.co.nz

If you're lucky enough to be a member of the global 1%, last year was another good year to be alive (every year is pretty great, though).

Your wealth bracket increased its share of global riches so that it holds just over half of global wealth, according to a new report from Credit Suisse.

In the years 2000 to 2007, the richest people on Earth actually saw their proportion of global wealth fall, from 49% to 45%. But since the recession the trend has gone into reverse: The top 1% now controls 50.4% of all household wealth.

Wondering if you're in this elite club? You'd need a total of $759,900 in assets, after debts have been subtracted.

What about the top 10%? That's a little easier: you'd only need $68,500. And the top half: Count yourself in if you have $3,210.

"While the bottom half of adults collectively own less than 1% of total wealth, the richest decile holds 87.7% of assets, and the top percentile alone accounts for half of total household wealth," the report says.

In fact, the 1% is doing better relatively speaking than the 10%, which achieved its highest wealth share back in 2000.

Credit Suisse puts the stunning rise of the 1%, and the inequality that goes with it, down to one main factor: growth in equity prices around the world. The rich are getting richer because they own things that are appreciating in value.

At the same time, average wages in the U.S. and elsewhere have been stagnating: Wages now make up a record-low share of U.S. gross domestic product. Continue reading

Sources

• Co.Exist, from an article written by Ben Schiller, New York-based staff writer for Co.Exist.
• Image: Financial Post

Whether the poor also get poorer is another matter.

What would the taxi driver who took me across Beijing last year in a Toyota tricked out with three smartphones have said?

Not so long ago, he was driving a three-wheeled, pedal-powered rickshaw.

It's more a case of the poor getting richer too - but without political intervention, they'll never catch the rich.

In the English-speaking world particularly, still reeling from the global financial crisis and growing tired of a managerial elite whose salaries appear unstoppably stratospheric, Piketty's new, best-selling doorstop of a book - Capital in the Twenty-First Century - is altering the debate about wealth, income and the future of capitalism and is set to be Harvard University Press's all-time best-seller.

Piketty has reframed the discussion by combining, for the first time, data sources spanning more than three centuries to prove that those with accumulated wealth are almost guaranteed always to become richer than those who work for a living.

The distinction between wealth and income is important.

Although excessively high incomes for chief executives is a live political issue, and Piketty would tax them at a rate as high as 80%, the bigger issue is the inter-generational impact of wealth accumulation.

He proposes taxing such wealth at a rate of 0.1-0.5% for fortunes of less than €1 million ($1.6 million), 1% for fortunes from €1-5 million, 2% for €5-10 million and from 5-10% for fortunes in the hundreds of billions of euros.

Critics note that if he's calling $1.6 million a fortune, then Piketty is putting many of the developed world's homeowners in the same boat as the "one per cent" global elite.

However, most of the attacks on his findings focus on the proposed solutions rather than the quality of the research that animates his conclusions. Continue reading.

Source: The Listener

Image: Emmanuelle Marchadour/AP in The Guardian

"A Christian cannot coexist with the spirit of the world," he said, speaking in a room of the Assisi archbishop's residence where St Francis shed himself of his rich clothes and embraced a life of poverty.

Worldliness, the Pope said, "leads us to vanity, arrogance, pride. And this is an idol, it is not of God."

Those who try to act as Christians without renouncing their worldly attitudes become "pastry-shop Christians", the Pope said — "nice sweet things, but not real Christians".

"The worldly spirit kills; it kills people," he continued. "It kills the Church."

While he spoke of the need to purify the Church, Pope Francis poked fun at anxious Catholics who had predicted in the media that he would "strip the bishops, the cardinals, himself" during his visit to Assisi. He assured listeners that he intended only to strengthen the Church by eliminating distractions.

The Pope said he directed his invitation not merely to the hierarchy but to all the Church's members, and that he sought renunciation of spiritual complacency as well as of material riches.

"When the media speak of the Church, they believe that the Church means priests, nuns, bishops, cardinals and the Pope," he observed. "But the Church is all of us and we all have to strip ourselves of this worldliness."

In a homily at a Mass he celebrated in the square outside the Basilica of St Francis, the Pope disputed popular misconceptions of St Francis and his legacy.

The common association of St Francis with the cause of peace and love for creation is badly incomplete, he said.

The peace which Francis received, experienced and lived "is the peace of Christ, which is born of the greatest love of all, the love of the cross", the Pope said.

"Franciscan peace is not something saccharine. Hardly. That is not the real St Francis. Nor is it a kind of pantheistic harmony with the forces of the cosmos. That is not Franciscan either; it is a notion some people have invented."

Sources:

Catholic News Service

Vatican Radio

Catholic News Agency

Image: Free Republic

Both publications illustrate the immense power and wealth that is concentrated amongst a miniscule group of businesspeople. According to the NBR, 'The rich continue to get richer'. Editor Nevil Gibson says 'This year's Rich List is bigger and richer than ever before, with the total minimum net worth of members now at $47.8 billion, an increase of $3.5 billion on last year's list. Add the small group of New Zealand-based international billionaires and the figure climbs to $60.4 billion, an all-time record' - see: How to be a millionaire - NBR Rich List.

This enrichment is because, Gibson says, 'The past year has been a good one financially', with record profitability: 'The surge in wealth is mainly due to the substantial gains of most investment classes; the New Zealand equity market returned 25.9% last year'.

Most of the 2013 NBR Rich List information is behind the NBR paywall online, but you can still see the summary Rich List at a Glance (Wealth order), as well as the individual entries for various rich-listers such as Graeme Hart, Richard Chandler, the Todd family, Owen Glenn, and Alan Gibbs. And of course there's some very political people on the list too - for example, both the National Party's leader and president - see: John Key and Peter Goodfellow's family. A good summary of the report can also be read in Steve Deane's Hart returns to top of wealthier NBR rich list.

Further evidence of growing wealth and profitability in New Zealand was also seen earlier this week via Hamish McNicol's Luxury car sales leave rest behind and Christopher Adams' Banks' profit jumps 12.9pc, nears $1b. Continue reading

Sources

• Bryce Edwards in The New Zealand Herald
• Image: IZ Quotes

Dr Bryce Edwards is a politics lecturer at University of Otago.