'Tax us now': Millionaires call on the global elite to tax them more

cnbc.com:

A group of over 150 millionaires are calling on the elite attendees of this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, to tax them more.

The group, known as «Patriotic Millionaires,» published an open letter on Monday reiterating calls for the attendees of WEF to «acknowledge the danger of unchecked wealth inequality around the world, and publicly support efforts to tax the rich.»

«Tax us, the rich, and tax us now,» the letter said, which included actor Mark Ruffalo and heiress Abigail Disney among its signatories.

They explained in the letter that the inequality baked into the international tax system had created distrust between the people of the world and its rich elites.

To restore that trust, the group argued that it would take a «complete overhaul of a system that up until now has been deliberately designed to make the rich richer.»

«To put it simply, restoring trust requires taxing the rich,» the millionaires said.

They said that the WEF Davos summit didn't deserve the world's trust right now, given the lack of «tangible value» that had come from discussions at previous events.

Some the millionaires even staged pro-taxation protests at Davos over the weekend.

This latest call from the rich to be taxed more comes as rising prices ratchet up the cost of living for people around the world.

Patriotic Millionaires referred to an Oxfam brief, published Monday, which found a billionaire was minted every 30 hours during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Oxfam estimated that nearly million people could fall into extreme poverty at a similar rate in 2022.

Julia Davies, founding member of Patriotic Millionaires U.K., said that as «scandalous as it is that governments seem to be utterly inactive on dealing with the