Income inequality

 Television news this morning showed troops of protestors trudging through the Swiss snow to plant their banners before the great and good at their annual meeting in Davos. Time, that pillar of publishing in the centre of capitalism, reported in 2019 on the reasons. 

Governments, companies and civil society must take drastic measures to reduce global inequality in order to improve lives, save the environment and stem rising populism, experts gathered at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, said Friday at a panel called ‘The Cost of Inequality.’

The panel, developed in partnership with TIME and moderated by TIME's CEO and Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal, met to discuss the ways inequality has contributed to a populist backlash around the world.

One of the top issued raised by panelists was the assertion that multinational corporations and the very wealthy are not paying "their fair share" of taxes.

“No one is talking about tax evasion," said the historian Rutger Bregman of those gathered at Davos. "I feel like I’m at a firefighters' conference and nobody is allowed to talk about water.”

Also high on the agenda was the recognition that low corporate tax rates, today the policy of many governments around the world, are a relatively recent historical phenomenon. "Governments have chosen not to tax fairly, to get rich companies and rich people to pay their fair share of taxes," said Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam International's executive director. "Because they don't collect those taxes, they don't put enough money into health, education and social protection of their people."

The result is rising levels of inequality around the world. According to a recent Oxfam report timed to coincide with Davos 2019, 26 billionaires had the same wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people combined. About half of the world’s population lives off less than $6 per day.

Things have not improved since, according to Oxfam's latest report.

The world’s top 1 percent grab bed nearly two-thirds of the $42 trillion in new wealth created since 2020, Oxfam says in a new report released to coincide with the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. The share was almost twice as much money as the amount obtained by the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, according to Oxfam’s “Survival of the Richest” report.