The World – January 22, 2023

In a proposal aimed at reducing the gap between rich and poor

In the world, the winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, Joseph Stiglitz, called for taxes of up to 70 percent on the wealthiest to address the problem of widening economic inequality globally.

Stiglitz is a 79-year-old American economist who received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.

He is seen as a pioneer in the field of globalization and inequality around the world, according to the British newspaper "The Guardian", Sunday.

He said a global income tax of up to 70% on the super-rich would be "logical".

"People at the top are working less on the solution of being taxed more, but on the other hand, our society will be more cohesive and equal,"he added.

He pointed out that increasing the income tax rate on the highest-income people would lead to a more just society, while taxing the wealth accumulated by the wealthiest over generations would have a greater impact.

"Wealth should be taxed in large proportions, because a large part of it came by inheritance,"he continued.

"We have to realize that most of the billionaires in the world got their wealth by luck,"said the former chief economist of the World Bank.

He described the proposal put forward by US Senator Elizabeth Warren as"reasonable", noting that it includes imposing a 2% tax on people with assets of more than 50 million dollars and 3% on people with more than a billion dollars.

But he stressed that a long time will pass before incomes begin to flow so that they can alleviate the problems of the United States.

He considered that the corona pandemic has exacerbated the problem of inequality to amazing levels, stressing that it has exposed and exacerbated inequality at the global level.

A research prepared by the charity organization "Oxfam", last week, showed that about two-thirds of the wealth generated since the beginning of the epidemic went to the 1 percent of the wealthiest.