Yves came too many people who should know describe the philanthropy of the rich as a viable alternative to decent social services and safety nets. The poor record of the United States in the late Soviet era should eliminate any such illusions. Our average height, a measure of the nutritional level of the entire population, was once the world’s first. no longer. Vox from 2016:

recent [Mariachiara] Caesar’s [a public health researcher with Imperial College London]Work with hundreds of researchers around the world to collect data from surveys in 200 countries (in some cases, they dig military records without such research). This data set was recently published in Elife magazine, spanning a century, and contains data from 18.6 million people born between 1896 and 1996… In the early 20th century, Americans were some of the tallest people in the world. We are now ranked 37th among men and 42nd among women.

The United States has also been among the best in life expectancy. No more. From our data world:

Why is the life expectancy of Americans lower than that of people in other rich countries, even though they pay much more for health care?

The short summary that I will discuss below is that Americans suffer from higher death rates due to smoking, obesity, homicide, opioid overdose, suicide, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition, more severe poverty and less health care means that lower-income Americans are younger than poor people in other rich countries…

In the 1970s, the United States did not stand out at all. The reason why it is now is that life expectancy has increased much more slowly than other countries. At the same time, medical expenditures in the United States have grown faster, especially since the mid-1980s. As a result of these two abnormal developments, the United States has followed the flatter trajectory shown by the chart.

The development of inequality in recent decades has led to inequality between the United States and other wealthy countries. In the United States, per capita medical expenditure is four times higher, but life expectancy is lower than in all these countries.

Elon Musk gave examples of the problems of wealthy people around the world. ProPublica used him and Jeff Bezos as typical representatives of super-rich scammers because they received a large number of government subsidies and paid federal income taxes effectively for a long time. Elizabeth Warren uses Musk’s dubious title of Person of the Year to call his welfare queen status (not rude enough anywhere). Musk can refuse the opportunity to act like a spoiled child. From Bloomberg:

Monday, the day Elon Musk was appointed Time Magazine Person of the Year, Senator Elizabeth Warren commented on the tax law and its relationship with the CEO on Twitter Teslaand Space Exploration Technology Corporation.

Let’s change the rigged tax law so that the person of the year will actually pay taxes and stop stealing money from others. https://t.co/jqQxL9Run6

-Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) December 13, 2021

Elon Musk responded on Tuesday by tweeting a review article on Fox News in 2019 concerning claims of her Native American ancestry.

Stop casting! https://t.co/Kibp6aS9vL

-Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 14, 2021

Warren won the first round of the Twitter war by getting more retweets and likes than Musk, so he redoubled his efforts by calling her Senator Karen. charming.

Author: Richard Murphy, Chartered Accountant and Political Economist.He has been The Guardian description As an “anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert”. He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economics and Director of UK Tax Studies at City University of London.He is a non-executive director Cambridge Econometrics. He is a member of the organization Progressive Economic Forum. Originally published on UK Tax Research

As Guardian’s Notes This morning:

During this period, approximately 344,000 top earners had pre-tax income of more than £175,000, accounting for 17% of UK pre-tax income (including capital gains), but only 6% of all charitable donations.

Obviously becoming rich will not make you generous: on the contrary, it will make you mean.

And the situation is getting worse:

The healthiest people’s income has increased, Other evidence also shows.

However, charitable donations have declined.

As Mrs. Thatcher’s children became richer and richer, the country became more stingy.

No wonder We let people like Rish Sunak argue that the new Covid booster needs to implement austerity policiesThis just shows the selfish thinking of the very wealthy people in our society.

It is precisely because of the harm these people cause and the impact of their wealth on growing inequality that we must Tax more multimillionaires. We don’t need their money to pay for public services. What we need is to stop their power to undermine the well-being of our society.