The Covid-19 pandemic has caused great damage to the global economy.
It has forced governments around the world to allocate staggering amounts of money to fight the disease, as well as to protect people and businesses that are financially vulnerable.
But who will pay the bill?
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The calls to the richest people in the world to put their hands in their pockets and wallets are getting louder.
Such demands are anything but new, but this time they seem to have stronger support coming from the rich themselves. More precisely, from the exclusive club of the "super-rich".
A group of 83 multi-millionaires published an open letter this week, asking governments around the world to make them and "people like us" - as they put it - pay higher taxes and finance the global recovery.
"Right away. Abundantly. Permanent," they wrote. "As Covid-19 increasingly affects the world, millionaires like us could play a key role in healing our world."

Among the signatories is Morris Pearl, an American banker who once led BlackRock, one of the largest investment funds in the world.
"It's not that I particularly want to pay more taxes or that I have purely altruistic motives," Perl told the BBC over the phone from New York.
"People in the world are starving or don't have enough money to get on with their lives."
Since 2013, Perl has worked with Patriotic Millionaires, a group that lobbies the super-rich as well as the US government to do more to fight inequality in the country - including calls for new taxes on the wealthy.
"I don't want to live in a world with a handful of rich people and many, many poor people." It's not the world I grew up in and it's not the world I want my sons and grandchildren to grow up in," he adds.

Then again, that seems easier said than done - why?
For starters, "tax generous" millionaires and billionaires seem to be more the exception than the rule in the world of the super-rich.
But that is not all.
Who are the "super-rich"?
"Super-rich" is a broad term for the affluent, known in the financial world as "ultra high net worth individuals" (UHNWI).
Which is to say, those with a personal fortune of US$30 million or more.
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It's a very exclusive group of just over 500.000 individuals from all over the world, according to 2019 estimates by Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank behind the esteemed annual UHNWI report.
They make up only 0,003 percent of the world's population... but they own 13 percent of the wealth.

Just to give you an idea of how unequal this distribution is, you should know that the majority of adults in our world - nearly three billion people - have personal wealth worth less than $10.000.
And where do these super-rich live?
Knight Frank, a British real estate consulting firm, estimates that the majority are in the United States - 240.000 or almost half of this elite, followed by China (61.500), Germany (23.000) and France (18.700).

The super-rich sure do pay a lot of taxes, don't they?
Let's first address why this is important: simply put, tax is an important source of revenue for every country in the world.
Most importantly, that money helps governments fight poverty and inequality in the form of investments in areas such as public health and education, among others.
Taxation systems are very complex and diverse.
The general principle is that wealthier people pay more tax on income - what someone earns each year from work, shares and annuities, for example.
But that's not always the case with their wealth tax - which is the value of assets you own, such as houses and stocks.

The vast majority of countries do not have a wealth tax.
And that's the kind of additional taxation that the group of 83 millionaire signatories to the letter want to see introduced to help lessen the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy.
If 5 percent seems too little to you...
Generally speaking, income tax rates for the wealthy have declined over the past few decades.
The Beatles sang George Harrison's song in 1966 tax man, and in the text they complained about the 95 percent tax rate on the rich introduced by the then British Prime Minister Howard Wilson.
Today, the equivalent rate is 45 percent.

An American study by economists Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zuckman, from the University of California, showed in 2017 that the 400 richest American families paid an income tax rate of 23 percent, while the poorest families in the country paid 24 percent.
How that? Saez and Cukman highlight the accumulation of tax breaks for the rich that have been approved by US lawmakers over the years.
As a consequence, the top one percent contribute proportionately less in taxes than poor families.
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And there are indeed countries where the rich have to pay much more: in Sweden, they can be taxed as much as 60 percent.
Don't the rich pay more into the government budget?
Yes, but the sacrifice made by poorer families is greater when we consider that they earn much less.
Some of the super-wealthy may rely on bookkeeping resources to legally reduce tax, in what is known as a tax avoidance scheme.
This may include storing money in tax havens, countries or regions that offer very low or no tax, as well as financial confidentiality.

Several international agencies have criticized this model, as they believe it opens up the possibility for more dubious (and even illegal) practices - as revealed in the infamous Panama Papers scandal, when evidence was provided of fraud and tax evasion by a large number of wealthy individuals.
So why don't governments just tax the super-rich more?
One reason is that throughout history tax has been a politically sensitive and polarizing issue - and a battleground on which some elections have been won or lost.
There is also some concern that too much attention is being paid to the super-rich.
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"Taking only the super-rich to the teeth is not a solution for countries because there aren't many of them," says Helen Miller, deputy director of the London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies and an expert on tax policy.
"I'm not saying 'leave them alone,' but that we need to implement broader tax reforms."
Some experts, however, estimate that just a little tweaking of the way the super-rich are taxed would go a long way.
A plan on this issue that was widely covered by the media was presented last year by US Senator Elizabeth Warren, who tried to secure the nomination of the Democratic Party for the 2020 presidential election.

She designed a wealth tax that would start with households with assets of $50 million, projected to raise $2,75 trillion over ten years.
Warren has since dropped out of the presidential race, but presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has also announced ambitious plans to tax the super-rich -- in the country with the highest concentration of them.
What do the super-rich think about paying more taxes?
Polls conducted around the world have shown that people overwhelmingly support raising taxes on the rich.
Among them are some rich ones.
A survey conducted by the American business news channel CNBC last December showed that about 60 percent of American millionaires support a wealth tax for people with assets of more than $50 million - although that support dropped to 52 percent for a similar tax starting at $10 million.

Emma Agyemang is a British journalist who reports on tax issues for the Financial Times. She says wealthier people have begun to accept what appears to be an imminent shift towards higher or new taxes.
"Most of our readers are significantly wealthier than average and they are not in favor of a wealth tax," she explains.
"But they think some form of wealth tax is more likely at this point than ever before."
A common argument of those opposed to tax increases is that it is unfair to single out the super-rich.
In March of last year, the American billionaire and former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, did not hide his position against tax increases.
"We need a healthy economy and we should not be ashamed of our system," he said.
"If you want to see a system that is not capitalist, just look at what was probably the richest country in the world, and today people are dying of hunger in it. It's called Venezuela."
Aren't the super-rich generous with charitable contributions anyway?
It is true that some of the richest people on the planet have supported many charities.
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Most notably, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife have given about $50 billion to charity since 1994, for causes such as vaccine research and development.
However, in recent years there have been increasing calls for the super-rich to pay higher taxes instead of giving money to charity.

Critics of this type of philanthropy argue that governments, rather than charities, are the best conduits to decide what is the best use for these resources and say donations can be conditional, such as specific actions preferred by the donor.
And then there's the fact that charities can legally be used as a way to pay less tax.
And what about corporate tax?
Businesses around the world are required to pay income tax.
But corporate tax has become a controversial issue, as many firms linked to the super-rich have paid little or no tax in recent years due to loopholes, tax breaks and other perks.

Oxfam estimates that corporate tax avoidance costs poor countries at least $100 billion a year in lost revenue.
That money would be enough to provide education for 124 million children or prevent eight million deaths of mothers in childbirth or newborns, according to data from this non-governmental organization.
Amazon, the e-commerce giant owned by Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man in modern history according to Forbes, paid zero dollars in US federal income tax in 2018, for example.
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True, he's not alone: some 90 percent of other big companies, including Starbucks, IBM and Netflix, did the same that year, taking advantage of the tax cut package approved by President Donald Trump.
Amazon said it paid $162 million in federal taxes in 2019, which is less than two percent of the company's annual earnings.
"Companies bend the rules as much as they can, but there's nothing illegal about it," says tax expert Helen Miller.
"What is needed is to change the rules," she concludes.
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