The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, it’s justice. The single greatest public health measure for mental health isn’t another charity: it’s wealth equity. In short, it’s publicly shared data and statistics on wealth and wealth ownership (i.e., anonymity for individuals withstanding), as well as a progressive (i.e., percentage of) tax on total wealth.
The image, used above, is a visual aid comparing a single unit of space to a 100 million of those similar visual units. With some imagination, a billion dollars starts to become a ridiculous amount: whether in money, or pixelated space. The question that keeps me up at night is: how much money does a person need to live a ‘good-life’? The next question that gives me nightmares is: “at what expense to others, would it take to sustain our current way of living?”. I am a privileged 1st world, lower-middle class individual. The world isn’t perfect, and never will be. But just like fairness or compassion, it is something we value and strive to achieve in this world: and wealth equity is part of that struggle.
Influenced by Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital in the 21st Century, I am shocked that wealth inequality is never addressed in the news. I am not an economist, I barely understand economics, but I am of the lower-middle-class, and I am a citizen of a 1st world country that still prioritizes criminalizing the use of drugs (i.e, the prohibition of drugs, leading to ever stronger new artifical drugs being created), over a living wage and wealth equity. There is so much news about doctor and nurse shortages, strikes, and public health infrastructure being under funded, yet there is never any news on solutions to funding problems. Addressing wealth equity, through a progressive taxation, one would think, would be a substantial news story: both because it proposes a solution (rather than reporting on a problem), and it also has the merit of actually being a potential major source of funding for public services.
I write this, not to explain economics to anyone (I barely know anything on the matter), but rather to put a Wealth Tax, back on public focus. I write, and read, mostly on mental health; reading for over 10 years on mental health, I can firmly say that the single most effective tool for combatting mental health is equity against poverty, and a wealth tax is a major advancement in that direction. I hope this topic gets written about more, and that it becomes a major focus of the Canadian Government (and specifically, the NDP). To quote a worn out quote: “people don’t need a hand-out, they need a hand-up”; and equity and fairness, driven by the work of coordinated action, is that hand up.
