Tax justice - equal rules for all

All over the world, public coffers lack the resources needed to invest in the future, including for healthcare, education, public infrastructure, and public services. Meanwhile, global wealth is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a select few. Tax justice is one of the key tools for counteracting the ever-increasing polarisation of our societies and protecting our democracies. In addition to fair burden-sharing through progressive tax systems at the national level, it is also important to put a stop to the widespread practice of profit shifting by multinational corporations and tax avoidance by high-net-worth individuals. 

As the annual Gini coefficient shows, Germany is one of the countries where wealth is distributed most unevenly. Society has become richer, but not more equitable. Billionaires often pay less tax than the middle class. Not for technical reasons, but because there is a lack of political will to change this. Nevertheless, there is strong support for the taxation of large fortunes: 62% of respondents in Germany are in favour of a wealth tax. It is therefore a question of fairness – and it is a question of democracy.  

With Gabriel Zucman, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the European Tax Observatory, Julia Friedrichs, journalist, author and filmmaker, Julia Jirmann, tax law and tax policy advisor at the Tax Justice Network, and Tim Klüssendorf, Member of the German Parliament and Secretary General of the SPD, we held an event entitled 'It’s Time to Tax Billionaires!', as well as a high-level expert discussion – with the Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for International Cooperation and Development, Dr Bärbel Kofler, and the General Secretary of the global trade union federation PSI, Daniel Bertossa etc. – discussing the causes of wealth concentration and political ways to effectively counteract it, both in Germany and internationally.