New report: time to end extreme inequality

From Oxfam, a major new report on inequality, with a good tax justice angle. The email notes:

“I am very pleased to share our major new report “Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Inequality”. With this, we launch our new five year global campaign for our organisation and will scale up our work on tax dodging across the world.

Inequality has grown to extreme levels. Today seven out of ten people live in countries where the gap between the rich and poor is greater than it was thirty years ago. Last year Oxfam calculated that in 2014 the richest 85 people on the planet owned as much as the poorest half of humanity – and between March 2013 and March 2014 these 85 people grew $688m richer every day.

Oxfam’s report documents how this rapid rise of extreme economic inequality is bad for everybody. It corrupts politics, hinders economic growth, stifles social mobility, and fuels crime and instability – even violent conflict. Crucially it is also standing in the way of efforts to eliminate poverty. The political and economic choices which have allowed small elite to take more than they need have also left hundreds of millions of people without access to clean drinking water and without enough food to feed their families. There is now an urgent need and opportunity to tackle these choices.

We know that inequality is not inevitable. With this report and the Even It Up campaign we are launching worldwide, we will start to focus attention on the solutions to this trend. We set out a vision of a “high road” of economic and political choices that will start to move us all towards a future of fair taxation, living wages, gender equality, health and education for all, social protection – and governance that truly works in the interests of the many.

The executive summary is available here: http://bit.ly/10YjEkY

And now, a suggested tweet.

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