Public Good or Private Wealth?

Abstract

Universal health, education and other public services reduce the gap between rich and poor, and between women and men. Fairer taxation of the wealthiest can help pay for them. Oxfam briefing paper-January 2019 Our economy is broken, with hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty while huge rewards go to those at the very top. The number of billionaires has doubled since the financial crisis and their fortunes grow by $2.5bn a day, yet the super-rich and corporations are paying lower rates of tax than they have in decades. The human costs-children without teachers, clinics without medicines-are huge. Piecemeal private services punish poor people and privilege elites. Women suffer the most, and are left to fill the gaps in public services with many hours of unpaid care. We need to transform our economies to deliver universal health, education and other public services. To make this possible, the richest people and corporations should pay their fair share of tax. This will drive a dramatic reduction in the gap between rich and poor and between women and men.

Time to Care: Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis

“…One reason for these outsized returns is a collapse in taxation of the super-rich and the biggest corporations because of falling tax rates and deliberate tax dodging. At the same time, only 4% of global tax comes from taxation of wealth, 18 and studies show that the super-rich avoid as much as 30% of their tax liability. 19 Extremely low corporate taxation helps them cream the profits from companies where they are the main shareholders; between 2011 and 2017 average wages in G7 countries increased by 3%, while dividends to wealthy shareholders grew by 31% ( Figure 2).…”

Addressing Unpaid Care to Close the Gender Gap in the Philippines and Zimbabwe: The Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care Project Report, 2016–2019

“…WE-Care's evidence on achieving change in UCDW has been exceptional, going beyond other reports which mostly highlight the problem of heavy and unequal care workloads. In 2019, one of the three key asks promoted by Oxfam in its WEF report 5 and associated media coverage was on unpaid care. WE-Care's policy asks and programme successes directly informed the report's recommendations on how to free up women's time by reducing and redistributing the millions of unpaid hours women spend every day caring for their families and homes.…”

Humanity and the 21 st century’s resource gauntlet: a commentary on Ripple et al.’s article “World scientists’ warning to humanity: a second notice”

“…This facilitates accounting for the true environmental and human costs in the provision of goods and services (de Groot Ruiz 2014). Other solutions include divesting from sectors that are at the origin of inequalities and unsustainability, such as the astronomically funded military sector (Tian et al 2018) and the unregulated stock market (Carlson 2018;Kuhn et al 2018), and addressing tax evasions (Galaz et al 2018;Lawson et al 2019).…”