American actor Mark Ruffalo, known for his role as The Hulk in the Marvel films, has joined a call from more than 150 wealthy people for higher taxes as global elites gather at the Economic Forum from Davos.
The actor is among the most recent signatories to an open letter titled “In Tax We Trust,” which was first published at a virtual conference in Davos in January, and was joined at the time by one of the heirs to the Disney empire, Abigail Disney.
“While the world has seen tremendous suffering over the past two years, we have seen our fortunes increase during the pandemic, but few, if any, of us can honestly say we pay a fair share of taxes,” he wrote in this updated message on the occasion of the Davos Forum.
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Abigail Disney
The group of “National Millionaires” behind the call says the number of signatories to the letter rose from 100 in January to more than 150 in May.
Its chairman, Maurice Pearl, the former CEO of financial giant BlackRock, vowed in a statement that he would “continue to press international leaders to meet our call: tax the rich before it’s too late.”
Taxing the richest is less effective than other fundraisers, Matthias Cormann, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, said in Davos on Tuesday.
“It doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of financial resources,” Mr. Corman said during a conference. “In terms of political impact, it is attractive, but it is not effective in terms of objectives,” he added, referring on the other hand to the effectiveness of real estate taxes.
“Wealth taxes have an enormous scope, they have been tested and in some countries are working,” said Gabriella Bucher, chief executive of Ofxam.
The NGO is campaigning for an extraordinary solidarity tax on wealth newly acquired by billionaires during the pandemic, with the goal of using the resources created to provide support to the most humble people, pending a more sustainable tax.
“It would be impossible to spend all the money that has been accumulated on one life,” she said on Tuesday.
The OECD, for its part, is the origin of the project for minimum taxes on multinational corporations and the distribution of taxes where they make their profits, which is currently under discussion.
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