Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Paul Buchheit discusses the U.S.' combination of increasing inequality, systematic tax evasion and false promises of social mobility. Michael Savage reports that even UK Cons are recognizing that a refusal to ensure that the rich pay their fair share makes for bad politics. And Steven Klees highlights how full funding for the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals is well within our means as long as the wealthy pay their fair share:

Wealthy countries need to honor the commitment, made in 1970 and repeated ever since, to allocate 0.7% of GDP toward ODA. While a few countries already do this, most fall far short. Just by keeping past promises, wealthy countries could close the education-funding gap – and cover all of the other SDGs’ financing needs, too. The Education Commission, by contrast, lets wealthy countries off the hook, by asking them to commit just 0.5% of GDP to ODA, and not until 2030.

Second, we need a global approach to taxation. As my colleague and I point out in a report for the Education Commission, corporate-tax reforms could eliminate tax avoidance and evasion, which are costing the global economy more than $600 billion every year. To achieve the needed reforms, we need to increase the UN’s capacity instead of relying on the OECD, which has proposed only minor changes. 

We also need to institute a global wealth tax, as economist Thomas Piketty has proposed. It is obscene that the world’s eight richest people hold as much wealth as the poorest 50%. Like corporate-tax reform and fulfilling past promises to fund ODA, a 1% global wealth tax could finance all of the SDGs combined.

- Meanwhile, Gillian Tett examines the close correlation between financial deregulation and outsized pay for bankers. Paul La Monica notes that workers generally are still seeing little benefit from increased economic activity due to sluggish wages. And Ben Doherty writes about the gross exploitation of migrant farm workers in Australia.

- Gabriel Yiu discusses how the B.C. Libs handed profitable parts of ICBC over the private sector while reducing revenue from luxury cars for their own political purposes - providing an indication of the road map the Wall government seems all too likely to follow in Saskatchewan.

- John Abraham reports on new research showing that dirty fossil fuels are being implicitly subsidized at a cost of trillions of dollars annually - or roughly 6.5% of global GDP.

- Finally, Kapil Khimdas and Danyaal Raza write that a focus on genuinely putting patients first - particularly through preventative care and a prioritization of needs - can lead to far better health outcomes.