A Forbes publication revealed that 8 Chilean families are among the richest in the world, reopening the debate on the “tax on the super rich” project, in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic in the country.
The magazine said that between 2019 and 2020, the accumulated fortune of this group increased by 73%, while the rest of the country experienced the first impact of the confinement. Regarding this, state aid to face the virus, and how to obtain the resources to economically defeat Covid-19, the Jesuit priest and researcher at the Manuel Larraín Theological Center, Jorge Costadoat, He pointed to one of the weaknesses of the economic model that currently prevails in Chile.
“We have an economic system for accumulating wealth and that is a fundamental piece that, in a country like Chile, we cannot aspire to change. We are within. However, an accumulation system would also have to be a system for the return of wealth. , because otherwise what is produced is an impressive concentration of wealth and power in the world, “he declared in conversation with The Counter at La Clave.
Costadoat pointed out that it is not a question of “being little less than apologizing to the super-rich and that only for this occasion will they have to cooperate”, because in his opinion, the issue of the return of wealth “would have to be part of the organization of the economy”.
According to the also theologian and philosopher, “just as the accumulation of wealth is necessary for the country to grow. The return of wealth is also necessary because the system has this imperfection.”
For Jorge Costadoat, the return route is the most successful because “here there is either return or recovery. Recovery can be violent, while return, in addition to being of good will, would have to be legal.”
For its part, the economist Javiera Petersen, agreed on the essentials of Costadoat’s idea and stressed that the objective “is not that the super-rich are being asked to please to give something.” According to the expert, “we must return to the discussion about the generation of value in the economy because ultimately those who produce the value of our economy are the workers.”
“Tax systems are essentially a system of income distribution. But we must advance to a system that can generate and distribute this wealth in endogenous ways,” said the economist, arguing that “the super rich are not a million times more productive than an ordinary person but they have a position of strength in the economy that allows them to appropriate the rents of natural resources and to pay low wages that makes them able to extract a greater part of the value that the economy creates. “
The objective, according to Petersen, is “to create a system that is not unbalanced from the beginning but that generates value and distributes it equitably.”
“Here we can advance, for example, in the participation of workers in companies, together with directors, but also in the fertilization of union movements so that there is a more democratic distribution of economic power,” he concluded.
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