 Right. Okay, I think that starts us off. Maybe I'll just wait for everyone to join. That looks like that just happened. And welcome to everyone. And both to you on here on zoom and those watching on Facebook live. Welcome to those watching in the future. Obviously, my name is Marie and I am a former student at the source economics department, and I will be the chair of today's event. Today's event is a part of the current source economics webinar series which is called intensifying inequalities and the limitations of global capitalism. The series aims at bringing together perspectives that extended that extend our understanding of how inequalities take root in our societies and economies, and how these relate to the crisis of global capitalism. These include contributions on feminist economics racial inequalities and economic imperialism. The series is organized by source economics department in collaboration with the students in the open economics forum and the source feminist economics network and the black economist network. And the topic specific to today is paying for the pandemic fighting class by fighting COVID-19. The main speaker is Ben tippett, Ben tippett is an is an educator, activist and author. He's currently doing a PhD in economics at the University of Greenwich. He's researching why he's researching the courses of wealth inequality in the UK alongside working for the Transnational Institute. He's also co founded the London learning cooperative, which is a radically inclusive internationalist and anti imperialist tuition agency, connecting students wanting to learn languages with tutors informally and currently colonized societies like Palestine, Pakistan, Ireland and Venezuela. We'll also have an intervention by Isha Thomas Smith. Isha is the director of movement building at neon. She's currently doing a PhD at Goldsmiths University at London where she's looking at neoliberalism and social justice work. In 2017 she also co founded Kim, which is a network for black activists working for collective liberation. Isha presents the next weekly economics podcast, economics with subtitles for BBC our for and the why factor for BBC World Services or World Service. And the order of the session is as follows, I will give the photo Ben in a second and then he will give his presentation which will be around 40 minutes. And then we'll hear from Isha. And then finally we will spend the rest of the session on a Q&A. This last bit we obviously need all of your questions so feel free to post as many as you want in the chat box here on zoom. And I think that's all from me now so Ben, the floor is yours. Brilliant thanks so much very thanks for the introduction. Let me just share my PowerPoint screen with you guys. Give me two sex. So, hopefully you can see that actually why I should do is put it on a slide show. Nice. Great. Okay, so hopefully you should be able to see that. So, the presentation I'm going to give today, it comes out of a report that I just released with the Transnational Institute. It's titled is paying for the pandemic and adjust transition. Just to give you a brief outline. Okay, actually, that's slightly weird that it's coming in. We'll go with whatever random order it's coming out with here so this is just an outline of what the talk is going to say so we'll start off with an introduction and the headline result from the report. I'll then talk you through the scope of the report. And then through each section that I look at so I first outlined what I think the kind of costs of the pandemic and the spending that we need for just transition are. And then outline what I considered to be these kind of progressive proposals and finish with some conclusions and last steps and moving forward. So, really, you know why this question, why do we need to talk about paying for the pandemic. So, in the process actually writing the report I had a discussion with the editor who lives in California. And he was describing the situation, it was, it was kind of around September and he was describing the situation in his hometown where he lived in California and at the time, basically California had had the worst forest fires on record, which basically meant if you tried to leave your house. You know, you couldn't because the smoke in the air was so intense that it would kind of clog up your lungs and you had to go back inside. Well, at the same time, you had the pandemic the pandemic that meant you know if you wanted to leave your house and meet anyone else from another household inside, you risked catching and spreading the disease. And it just struck me that really, even in the richest state of the most powerful country in the world. It's citizens were caught between these crises, you know, kind of a spreading pandemic amongst a spreading wildfire. Now obviously, not everyone has suffered equally when it comes to the pandemic. And even within California, we were just discussing this a little bit before we even started the call actually but even in California. Because of the lack of the lack of capacity really within the firefighting service and the way in which the public firefighting services have been gutted in the state. The state of California effectively relies on nearly 40% of its workforce to be from prison inmates. So that's what these guys are here. I'm just kind of trudging up the hill. And they do this for for literally $1 an hour. So you have these kind of intense class inequalities that are being exacerbated by these crises, but also if you look at the bottom picture what you see here is Bangladesh. So at the same time that California was on fire, Bangladesh had suffered one of the worst floodings in its history, a third of the country was underwater. And he was trying to do this at the time that it was also fighting the virus imposing lockdowns. And there is the fact that these crises, you know, they're, they're global in reach, but they obviously entrenched the inequalities that previously exist. And so I think in order to tackle this what we need in the words of charity Gersh is a global multicolored new deal, read to tackle the extreme wealth and income inequalities that exist in our society. And to fight back against the class war that is really being waged against people green to fight against the ecological breakdown, the climate change and other pressures that we're putting on the environment are causing effectively breaking down our life support systems and purple to put the care work that has been so central in terms of fighting the pandemic at the center at the center of our economies. Now, due to the unprecedented state spending that has already occurred with the pandemic, and also the fact of, you know, how, how are we going to fight all these things the big question that we're starting to see increase more and more and being asked more and more is the question of who is going to pay for this. You know, how are we going to fund this, you see this today so much in the UK with the spending review, the murmurs of an austerity narrative coming back, the idea that public sector workers can't get a pay increase because we don't have enough money because the money is not there. And that's really the question I'm trying to tackle with this report. And the kind of overarching result is the, when you add up the spendings that we need to take over the next 10 years to fight climate change to repay the debts of the pandemic to pay for the sustainable development goals, and also to tackle some of the big issues of reparations for us slavery. So we're up with a estimated spend of around 4.9.41 trillion dollars a year. When the income from, you know, this is a huge amount. In fact, global GDP is roughly around 87.7 trillion dollars so this is just over 10% of global GDP. And to fight this, I think we do actually have the resources to do it. And the, it's on the right panel here we have the income from 10 different proposals that I'm going to talk to you about today, which together are enough to cover these costs. Now, let me just. So, what we'll move to now is the scope of the report. I mean, what I do is I basically take pre existing proposals. So these aren't new proposals from my perspective they're pre existing proposals from academics and think tanks that already exist. I focus on a 10 year horizon so what we're looking at here and with those headline figures is not kind of going infinitely into the future because really doesn't I didn't think we can really talk about much beyond a kind of 10 year horizon. And also because of the fact that the sustainable development goals and also a lot of the climate investments that we need are up to 2030. So I think a 10 year horizon is a good way to look at this. The other kind of kind of limitation of the report is that these are static. So I don't really look at the interaction between the different proposals. I'm just looking at kind of statically how they might add up to an aggregate figure. And the last kind of limitation I guess is the, I don't discuss how to reallocate across countries. I take the most global estimates I can, because I'm trying to kind of look at the aggregate level of the globe whether we have enough estimates and what kind of policies are out there. And I think in a future work I'll be looking more at the mechanisms of how political mechanisms I guess of how these could be reallocated across countries. So, let's move on to the costs of the pandemic and spending for a dress transition. So the six spending or costs depending on how you want to understand them. The first two relate specifically to covered. The first one is to really pay back the fiscal measures that have already been announced by governments across the world, we would need to repay around 1.24 trillion dollars per year over the next 10 years. But this includes repaying back all of the debts and the principle, all of the debts plus interest so this is the principle plus interest on global debts. Now do we actually need to do that. Almost certainly not. The IMF even agrees that really we shouldn't be paying down debts at the moment, you know interest rates are at an historic low. In other countries in the global north, there's the ability to finance spending through monetizing forms of debts. And even in that case you know when you've had big shocks the public budgets in the past for wars from other kind of crises, really, these debts can be paid back over a long period of time so in a way this this first one is an overestimation of what we would need to do in the next 10 years but even so I think it's still important to look at it and have it in there. Our spending to is, well I mean the spending to is basically who's actually been taking this unprecedented levels of state spending. When we look at spending one is predominantly being countries in the global north. There are a variety of reasons countries in the global south have been prevented from from having the same level of injection. Part of the fact is that they're the debt levels are already too high. They don't have the ability to print money to service their debts in the same way that we do in the global north because a lot of the debt is held as external foreign debt. So, according to UNCTAD and the IMF the global south needs the equivalent of 283 billion a year of the next 10 years to combat covered in its immediate economic impacts. In theory this would be handed out today as effectively 2.5 trillion. And then what I do is I spread that out over 10 years at given some kind of weighted average of a given a world interest rate. So spending three. This is the upper end of the big estimates of how much we might need to decarbonize the global economy. This includes things like decarbonizing the energy infrastructure the transport infrastructure infrastructure and these estimates come from the IMF and the World Bank. So there's there's a little bit of spread. There's some I think maybe go slightly over three trillion some that are much below it. But I've chosen a kind of more upper level estimate here of three trillion. Spending four is again from similar organizations the IMF and the UN if you want to see the sources for these, then go to the report and it outlines everything there. Again, it's estimated at three trillion per year. Five now this is the first. This thing introduces the idea of reparations. So, in my research I could only really find estimates just for the US alone. So this would, you know, under eight under depending on what kind of regime of reparations we would want any kind of global regime of reparations would obviously come in at a higher cost to this but for the US. There are estimates that put it at around 15 trillion. If you add up effectively all of the lost hours of work, basically you will you take is you take the wage rate at the time that there was shadow slavery in the US. It's an estimate of how many hours were worked by slaves, and then you add a kind of interest rate to take into account inflation of 3% and you come up with these quite wide ranging figures but the upper estimate of that was 15 trillion. And the last one the last kind of big investment or spending is the need to pay for climate reparations. So we started the talk with the discussion of Bangladesh. There's a whole range of lower middle income countries where the costs from loss and damages that are going to be phased over the next few years are astronomical. And I think because of the historic injustice of climate change, you know the fact that the countries who are suffering the biggest brunt of it are the ones who are historically the least responsible. There needs to be put in place some kind of global preparations redistribution mechanism. And the estimate here 300 billion comes from an estimate of how much the loss and damages are going to be per year over the next 10 years for countries in low and middle income countries. So that's the cost side of things or the spending side of things. How about the proposals. Well, this figure to the right has the proposals, and it has a proportional to the size of how much revenue we expect them to bring in. Now, the whole point of this really is that it's supposed to be designed to make those with the broadest shoulders pay. When you talk about raising money to pay for things you face and I think some strong criticisms to say this isn't the right time to be talking about this. You know, we shouldn't be talking about paying off debts we shouldn't be talking in that narrative because it would justify the way to austerity. And I think that there is there's obviously truth to that you know I don't think we should be necessarily talking right now about paying that paying down the debts. But this idea of printing money or getting into more debt in the global north. Isn't I think sufficient for progressives are for three reasons. The first is that there's a debt crisis happening in the global south right now, and getting into more debt in the global north putting just putting progressive proposals to deal with that there's nothing to solve that crisis and if anything potentially makes that crisis worse, because of the relationship between things like QE and debt crisis is in the global south, which again you can look into a little bit more go to the report. The second thing is the. This is, this is, you know, a real opportunity I think to shape the discourse. This is an opportunity when we say how we pay for the pandemic or who will pay for the pandemic. What we're really talking about is who will the post crisis economy work for. And as progressives we have to obviously put forward a set of proposals that I think both raises money to pay for the things we need but also the tackles inequality, the tackles militarism colonialism and climate change. So, what these proposals do is show that we do have the resources to pay for the things we want, while at the same time tackling these things. So, there's 10 proposals, I'm going to go through each one. What is the time just trying to. Okay, so I've got, I've got enough time to talk through each one is substantial that depth. The first one is a global world tax could raise 4.4 trillion a year. Now the source for this comes from Piketty's new book, Thomas Piketty the French economist's new book capital and ideology. I'll go a little bit into the mechanics in a sec but I think it's important to think about what the justification for such a world tax could be. I mean the first one is the fact that in this obviously increasing wealth inequality. About 1% own about as much wealth as the bottom 88% of the population. So we have an extreme distribution of wealth. And we know that this wealth is increasing, this inequality series increasing over time. The second is that there's also. This inequality wouldn't be a problem if everybody had a basic standard of living everybody had the goods and services that they needed to survive as I'm sure you will know this isn't the case. And the pandemic itself is threatening to push half a billion people into into poverty. And I think that to really given the fact that there's such extreme poverty and the pandemic is making this worse while at the same time increasing wealth inequality, increasing the wealth of people at the top really justifies the intervention by governments to do something about this. And the third thing is that there's increasing public support for wealth taxes. The inheritance tax which is the UK is only existing tax at the moment only existing wealth tax at the moment is one of the most unpopular taxes. It's always been used as a way to say, you know, people don't really want to tax on the stock of wealth, but really recent polling shows that actually introducing new progressive wealth taxes that predominantly increased taxes on the rich is by far the most popular way to raise money to pay for the COVID deaths and part of the reason is because, at least for the UK public at least they know that this will decrease wealth inequality. So, you know, this is very much on the agenda, I think, and the issue has gone from in 2012 being ridiculed I think is being an unserious proposition to now having commissions across lots of countries in the world. You had the Davis Commission in South Africa, you have the, the World Tax Commission by the IFS here, who are really seriously thinking about implementing these things. So there's a couple of problems I think with implementing a global world tax one is that there's no global tax collector. Right, so we need some kind of coordination mechanism to make sure that all countries were implementing a similar level of tax now that that's, that is an ambitious thing to do which makes this estimate I think something that not, you know it's not a proposal we could implement tomorrow, but it's definitely something we should be putting out there in order to build the institutions to build towards Now the second big things that people raise about world taxes. Well, one is the rich will just pack up their bags and leave. So they'll just evade the tax. This is why I think we need a global world tax based on a global world tax registers and some of the other proposals I'll discuss will deal with this as well. The other big issue is liquidity. So do if you put wealth taxes on stocks of wealth people might not have the income in order to repay and I was, I was listening to an interesting historical account of the fact that one of the reasons why the wealth tax failed in the UK in 1970 1975 when they tried to implement it were it was partly because they've really cemented in the public eye the image of the like crumbling down big estate. You know the idea that we kind of imagine the aristocracy to be in these massive estates, and they're falling down and they don't have any income. This idea was really created at the last time that they tried to implement a wealth tax as a way of cementing the idea that like, if you try and stock tax the stock of wealth, what you'll do is you'll just destroy the heritage of the country. And I think this is a problem we need to think about when we implement world taxes that we need to, I think that will rear its head again, and any design has to overcome something like that. That said, I don't think these are insurmountable problems I mean you deal with liquidity issues by creating financial products to deal with it. It's it's or you or you implement it on death you know there's there's ways of dealing with this. Okay, so that that's some of the justifications and problems with the wealth tax. What actually how do I get this 4.417 trillion a year. I mean the precision here is probably a little bit silly like, can we precisely say that I don't know I probably should have rounded that up. But anyway, it's a classic case of economists talking like very precisely, even though you know they might get the precision, the focus on precision over other factors maybe so. But basically the way that the world tax works is is progressive so the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution, the poorest 90% of households will be taxed at a very low rate of about 0.5%. Even within that you could have that rate ranked so that some people went taxed at all and the top, you know, 80% to 90% were taxed at a higher rate. So the top 10% a taxed at 1%, the richest 1% of households are taxed at a 5% rate and the very richest 0.1% households are taxed on average 10%. And at the very top, you might tax billionaires at 80% because we think that a society with billions of people in poverty shouldn't billionaires shouldn't exist in such a society. And therefore this would raise the effective tax rate for those who adjusted the threshold. So proposal two brings in the off-suring discussion, the problem of won't the rich just run away and hide their wealth. I think therefore what we need to do is we need to shut down tax havens and tax the offshore private wealth of individuals at current rates. This estimate comes from Zuckman, Gabriel Zuckman from 2014, which does make it slightly old and I'll come back to a slightly more updated version that came out last week after I'd released the report. But basically what we say is that if you tax the income from wealth, so you know, if you have capital that generates income at current rates, this is how much you could be raising. Now, again, what's the justification for this? Well, the richest people tend to be the ones that hide their wealth offshore. We see this from this paper here. The second is that we have to close down tax havens in order to implement any of the taxes that I'm talking about, otherwise they won't be effective. And I think the first step towards doing this would be to set out a global asset register. I'll come back in a sec to some of the progress I think that's been made in terms of tax evasion and offshoring over the last, in terms of tackling tax evasion and offshoring over the last few years. Proposal three, so the first two proposals look at individual wealth, so the wealth of rich individuals in our society. These proposals now look at corporate profits and income. So there's this idea that's floating around of the kind of windfall profit tax or the excess profit tax. You know, like a one off tax or repeated tax that lasts for like a set period of time on the most profitable companies in the world. According to Oxfam, an excess profit tax on the 32 most profitable company global companies this year would raise our 104 billion a year. So these are the kind of pandemic profit is people like Amazon, Google, Apple, they only focus on the 32 most profitable ones. Another justification for this is the fact that corporate profits are very unequally distributed you know one, one thing that you tend to hear is whenever you talk about taxing corporations is the Well, you're just taxing your pension fund, or you're taxing this kind of shareholder democracy that exists well for data that we have countries for like the US. Basically, the top 10% take something like 89% of corporate profits. And very unequally distributed in terms of an income source. The other big justification for this which is interesting is the fact that we've done it before so after the world after World War One after World War Two after the Korean War, excess profits for tax incredibly high rates. 80 to 95%. I should have said that the ox this ox time statistics I think has a tax rate of 95%. I've done it before and periods of crisis. I don't see why we shouldn't. We shouldn't do it again why why people should be able to profit from a pandemic, particularly when the high street is dying and when again so many people have been pushed into poverty proposal for looks at the offshore version of the corporate profits so we looked at individual wealth and we looked at a wealth tax and the offsuring of individual wealth this is now looking at corporate offsuring which is much bigger actually. I here I wanted to suit to the figures range quite dramatically obviously we don't we can't see the world so so we can't see the offshore profits so we don't know exactly how much there is and how much could be taxed. If these profits were brought into the into the light. There's the upper estimate of this comes from the IMF from 2015. Now, could we ever do this you know could we ever shut down tax havens and tax these tax these things. I mean it would require huge international cooperation. I think there is some precedent for it. I think particularly since the Panama papers have come out since austerity has kind of woken up public consciousness to the fact that the, the tax system is unfair. In the UK groups like tax justice network. You've had the big anti austerity movements have really kind of shone a light on this. I think there's been some progress at the international level in the US in 2010 implemented the foreign account tax compliance act this is basically an automatic exchange of data between foreign banks and the US internal revenue service. In 2014 this was kind of internationalized by the G20 and the OECD. And they have been doing a lot of work on this thing called BEPS which is base erosion and profit shifting basically the idea that if you're Apple you can shift your profits around to low tax havens how do we how do we stop that from happening. We went out with some interesting facts and statistics and proposals around this stuff. One of their things that they're talking about as well as this idea that you can have routine versus non routine profits which people are saying could be the basis of an excess profit tax. This is kind of all good. And I think it shows the, if there's political will, then stuff can be done about this. As I said, these reforms do have some problems. I mean one is that they generally exclude low income countries from their arrangements and from the table. There's a kind of lying that had somebody talking about this. Basically it says you know if you're not at the table, you are on the menu. I think summarizes actually have quite a lot of international organization, international coordination around these things work. And the second thing is that they still leave a considerable amount of wealth and profits still hidden offshore so they definitely don't go far enough, but it shows that whenever somebody says we can't do anything about tax evasion. Actually we can, and with a small amount of political well quite a lot has already been done. This network came out last week with an estimate adding together all forms of tax evasion and how much they think governments lost from it they come up with a lesser figure than mine 427 billion rather than the 725 billion which is basically adding proposal for and to. But anyway that's some technical details I think the point is there's a lot of money that could be raised from this. How much time I got. I think I've got 10 minutes is that right. Yeah you got 10 minutes left. Brilliant. All right, again, so then we can wisdom the last, the last five proposals. Stick stick with me and it tends tends tends I guess like a. It sounds like it's made up for a marketing thing. It kind of wasn't it just came out like this. So the financial transaction tax. This is an idea that came out of I guess Kate became prominent after the global financial crisis. The idea is that you have like very small rates of tax on the trades of different financial instruments. So this is about trying to stop like toxic financial trading is also about trying to raise money for governments. I think, you know, in a way this is almost more. But there's more of a justification to do it now, because then the financial sector work was in a obviously in a dire situation. Well, potentially it's in. It might be in a worse situation we don't really know yet but it's incredibly supported by public money. So this tax could be justified along the sense of we need to reclaim some of this public money back. That said, when the EU tried to implement a financial transaction tax in the kind of, I can't remember the exact date but 2013 2014. It basically was stopped by extremely heavy lobbying by the financial sector. So I think this raises a question. How do we overcome lobbying by specific interest groups. In order to get any of this done this stuff down particularly when you're talking about this stuff for kind of international level or regional levels by the EU where representation by civil society groups by trade unions. Just a tiny fraction of the lobbying representation that happens by big business proposal six in eliminating public subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and implementing attacks on the cost of pollution could raise an extra 3.2 trillion a year. So this is, I mean this comes in because of the fact that we really need to decarbonize and implementing changing our public subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and implementing attacks on fossil fuels. I think it's going to have to be an inevitable part of our process towards decarbonization. Direct subsidies by governments across the world is in the region of 200 to 400 billion a year. So the rest of this 3.2 trillion you'll be thinking that's a lot more than 400 billion, it comes from the tax on fossil fuels, and this this all comes from a paper from the IMF from last year. Now, you know we know about the gilet jean, you might know about the protests in Ecuador. When you try and tax carbon or tax fossil fuels, and if not properly designed, it can end up hitting the poorest households the hardest and can end up with a revolt that will effectively make the policy both unfair and completely inefficient and ineffective. So building what you know this has to be done alongside building publicly owned democratically organized renewable energy and providing sufficient social welfare so that people's incomes are massively at the bottom of the population are massively hit. So, if you want to look at some proposals for that, go to the report go to a great book by TNI by a guy called Oscar raise, where he looks at some of the ways in which we could do this. I think it's important to say here that the richest 20% of households currently received around six times more in subsidies than the poorest 20%. So, even, even though there's this kind of, there's that we need to implement proposals to deal with the impacts of, you know, subset, getting rid of the subsidies and taxing fossil fuels. The current system is not working for the poor. It's not working for the people going out in Malaysia and protests or the people who are going in protest against similar reforms in Ecuador. So I think reform is definitely needed. And, you know, this is a 10 year process so anything we do, you know, you can't tax, you can't raise this amount of money forever. This is going to slowly kind of whittle down. And I think this again is why we can only discuss these reforms within a 10 year process because after that hopefully will only be making a fraction of this amount. Because the use of fossil fuels will be quite quickly. And it will be substituted away from. Proposal seven looks at another social problem which is I think the problem of excessive military spending. I mean, I think hedgehogs economists or progressive economists tend not to really think too much about this. Maybe it's partly to do with the fact that like some of the big works that's done in kind of post Keynesianism tends to be focused. It tends to have a kind of interesting role for the military, you know, the military is like a source of innovation if you read Mariano Matzucato's book, this entrepreneur entrepreneurial stay, or, you know, the US military was a big kind of source of demand and Keynesian stimulus to do the, the, the Roosevelt New Deal. I think we need to realize though that when you, you know, when you, the destruction that's caused by excessive military spending, particularly I guess by US, US kind of neo imperialism. We need to have a more critical perspective on this. I think the pandemic has kind of given us space to talk about this, you know, it, we have a broader understanding of human security. You know, you can't tame a pandemic through the barrel of a gun. Despite the fact that the pandemic has been discussed in a discourse and narrative of war war. What you see is the, actually, the real threats to human security. It could already be dealt with by this, by this defense spending. Now, I say if we reclaim 10% of global military expenditure, this could kind of free up around 200 billion a year globally. This comes from a report by, I think it's called SIP, SIPPRI who are the Stockholm Peace Research Initiative. What's interesting is that some countries already starting to do this. South Korea said it will trim next year's defense budget by 2% Thailand by 8% with the money going instead to a disaster relief fund and a stimulus package. That said, if you've been following the news in the UK recently you've realized that our government is doing the opposite and has increased military spending. This is something that we need to campaign on. There's definitely big calls of global campaigning on this. Bernie Sanders, for example, has been pushing for this in the US. You have three minutes left, Ben. Okay, I've overshot it. So let me quickly go through the last proposals. So this really is the, the last proposals are dealing with the debt crisis that I discussed at the beginning of the talk. So 64 countries at the moment in the global south are currently paying more in debt servicing than on healthcare. Or at least they were at the beginning of the pandemic. I think this is the legacy of neoliberal policies and colonial inequality. What we need to do in the global south is in the global, well, as an international community is implement some debt jubilee. So the writer for debts. The G20 has done this to an extent this month has come up with the idea of the common framework, but it's been criticized by not including private creditors. And I think it's interesting because the World Bank, the president of the World Bank has called these private creditors and their role in the international debt system. It's a model equivalent of debtors prison. So really it's not dealing with one of the big actors that is holding these countries in the global south to ransom. If you want to look at this, I would go to Ulrich Volts's interesting report who I think isn't so as academic on debt cancellation where he sets out a proposal for this proposal nine is looking at special during rights. The special during rights is the IMS own international currency, it works a little bit like a gift voucher I can is maybe the best way of thinking about it, maybe it's not quite good. If you give somebody a gift voucher they can use it to exchange it for goods and services that freeze up money that they can use to pay for other things like their debts or for other services. In a way, if you issue these out and give it to countries in the global south, they can use it to solve some of their budget constraints. The managing director of the IMF has claimed that this isn't off the table. That said, it's been blocked by the US at the IMF who have a veto power, partly because of the fact that it will undermine the standing of the dollar in the international system. So if you create like a new, I mean it's not the creating a new international currency but if you increase the relevance of that currency. It will undermine the ability for the Fed to act as international underpass resort. And the last one is a Marshall plan this is effectively aid. We could give more aid in the global north to countries in the global south. I think it's interesting that today one of the big headline things of the, of the spending review is that the UK Chancellor there is going to cut our budget, the aid budget is seen as not, you know, there's, they're really pitching the interests of people, the working class in the global north against the working class in the global south. Okay, so the last section is looking just, I think, you know, how possible of these I mean I've taught you through some of the feasibility of some of these proposals I personally think anything is possible if there's the political world to do it. And what we, what I'm trying to share is that you know we can pay for the pandemic and much more but if countries work together. I think it's exposed to costs of a deeply unequal world but it's also shown the radical quick swift action is possible. There's that line. There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. And I think that is really what the pandemic shows. Hopefully it's a message that people won't forget as potentially the new normal sets in. And I think it is, though, that whenever you change taxes or systems of funding. The iron law, this is a quote by Gus O'Donnell who was the chief, the head of the British Civil Service during the Blair years he said, the iron law of a tax change is that the loser scream. What we then need is an international movement that understands that, you know, cap that these the people who are screaming are going to be the most powerful people in the world the most powerful corporations in the world. They're global, our solutions need to be to, and I think the way that you do that is by building the a more international, a more international movement that links these things up. So if you want to look at further resources, this is just a link to my book, where I discuss class inequality, the report and an article I recently summarized my report in the Guardian. Thanks very much. Thank you Ben, that was exactly four to two minutes of the extra two well done. I'll put a link to the report in the chat box if people want to check it out afterwards. And Asia, over to you. Thanks, thanks both. Yeah, Ben, that was a really great place to end with the call to international movement. That's, I guess where I'll be picking up. So yeah, my work with the new economy organizers network. Neff and others is mainly about building the strength and power of social movements with a particular focus on building connections between various struggles on the ground and the economic systems that shape our lives. And my academic work is concerned primarily primarily with the social cultural ramifications of neoliberalism and its implications for collective political action. So hopefully some of the thoughts that I'm sharing from that perspective will be will be relevant to the things that Ben was just laying out as well as being quite UK focused because that's where my work is based. So just a bit of a frame there so I thought it would probably be the most useful thing that I could do would be to offer some kind of additional thoughts to supplement Ben's fantastic work as well as reemphasizing some of the points in the report and ultimately offering some particular things that I think we should be looking out for as we move into a recovery phase. So, you know, as Ben has has laid out already the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many things but to me one of the most important and useful takeaways from this moment is that it's shown us that we need to think about the economy in a much broader sense, and really kind of ask ourselves what and who do we think it should be for. As we know the economy isn't just about money it's pretty much about everything that relates to how we live our lives it's healthcare it's housing migration childcare, all of these things are really deeply impacted by economic choices and so our conversation about what economics is should be equally expansive. And Neff we were part of some really interesting research called frame in the economy. Which I would really recommend folks seek out if you're interested in how people think about the economy but one of the things that the research revealed is that generally, we all have quite a narrow set of cognitive frames when it comes to thinking about what the economy could be for so we tend to kind of see it as a bucket, and with a finite amount of resources that good people put into, and bad people take out of so that's the kind of scrounger strivers narrative that's really kind of embedded in the cognitive frames, but covert has kind of started to create I think a bit of a wedge there in showing that it that we can in fact think of the economy as a system which we have control over and we can in fact reprogram around some of the things that we care about. And crucially it's also shown us has been emphasized that austerity was always a political choice, rather than an economic necessity, and that's going to be really vital when it comes to planning where we go from here. And so the main things that I'd like to highlight today are around the firstly the disproportionate impact of so many of our economic policies on people of color from austerity to climate change to covert and beyond that. And the other things I'll be talking about are what I think we need to be vigilant against when it comes to organizing for a just recovery. But before I do that just a few more points to lift up so I would yeah wholeheartedly agree with Ben's analysis in split which I would really recommend everyone reads a great book and the report and the proposals it laid out. It's vital that we go as far as we can in embedding an intersectional approach from top to bottom in how we respond to this. So for example, expanding on the global multicolored new deal frame so the red green and purple to include black or brown for people of color who are dying every day at the hands of state violence in trench inequality and systemic racism. One more thing I would say I think is a is a little bit of a word of caution for folks looking to organize around this is that any meaningful class based analysis or call to action is incomplete without consideration of the ways in which on a cultural level, people of color are constructed as subjects over whom predominantly white governors exercise the power to make live or let die. The legitimacy of colonialism as a political project was absolutely predicated on this construction of people of color is less than with their proximity to whiteness also used as a way of assigning proximity to humanity. It's this schema that has enabled the whole scale exploitation of the global south and the ravaging of its resources that still very much continues today. And this way of thinking that has laid the foundation for a world in which black people are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than their white counterparts and a world where black and POC lives are still disposable. I want to talk about just how stark this reality has been in the era of COVID here in the UK. But in my opinion, it's just to say really that until we're kind of willing to really grapple with some of the cultural and psychosocial legacies of colonialism and the many ways in which they still live within us and within our society. We will be falling short when it comes to kind of building the type of liberatory movements we need to win a just recovery. So to go on then to some of these points that I think we need to be we need to be looking out for so so the first thing as I said that I wanted to talk about was the disproportionate impact on people of color both of the pandemic and potentially paying for it as well. So hopefully I won't need to kind of labor the fact that people of color, especially in the UK but you know worldwide have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. One report that I did want to lift up that speaks to this really eloquently is the running me trust report overexposed and under protected the devastating impact of COVID-19 on BME communities in Great Britain. And just some of the findings of that report which which to me are so important were around the why behind why certain groups BME groups are more likely to be at risk from COVID-19 so some of those things are for example they're more likely to be working outside of the home. They're more likely to be using public transport, more likely to be working in key worker roles, and less likely to be protected with PPE even when they ask for it, as well as being more likely to live in multi generational overcrowded housing so much less able to self isolate and to and to shield. Other highlights from the report are that more than one third of black communities are in key worker roles, half of Bangladeshi key workers reported that they'd not been supplied with adequate PPE when they asked for it so huge numbers there. And a host of other really important statistics and there's also some great policy recommendations in that report to check out. But I think with with that report and lots of others and with the 2016 research from the women's budget group and the running me trust indicating that women people of color and in particular women of color had been affected most by austerity. And that by 2020 low income BME women would have lost nearly double the amount of money that working class white men will have. It's really crucial that we factor in thinking about how these pre existing inequalities. And my impact on how we pay for the pandemic. And, and beyond that, what a truly just recovery looks like, not just a recovery from COVID but from the racist racist impacts of the UK's economic policies for decades. And, and for more on that piece in particular I'd really recommend Gary Young's piece in the new statesman we can't breathe, which is kind of a really fantastic expose on on some of the COVID racial inequalities and more. So the other two pieces that I wanted to mention. Firstly, austerity. So this was this is obviously mentioned extensively in the report, but I thought it was important to give a bit more context on why we have to be so wary of a reintroduction of the austerity narrative. So, as we all know, the government has created financial support schemes for companies following workers for some self employed people for struggling businesses, as well as increasing the rate of universal credit expanding housing benefit and more. And some of the supporters of austerity like the former Chancellor Saju Javed have claimed that the last decade of cuts is what made this possible right that's that's kind of what enabled the government to respond in this way now. I don't have time to fully debunk this as painful as that is for me. But I would hazard a guess that saying most people on this call know that not only did austerity fail spectacularly on its own terms to reduce the debt to GDP ratio and shrink the deficit. But it also decimated our public services, leaving us in a much weaker position to fight the pandemic in the first place and we have to remember that. So, just to emphasize a few key points going into 2020 we had 4.1 million children living in poverty so this is before COVID and 19% year on year increase in food bank use and a decline in NHS funding over a decade. That has taken us back to around the same level of public spending on the NHS than we were in 1984. We have all seen the headlines about public sector salaries stagnating waiting time skyrocketing, etc, etc. But when it comes to paying for the pandemic and austerity, we have to kind of remember where we were before and watch out for government rhetoric like George Osborne's famous statement that we have to act to fix the roof while the sun is shining. In other words, we should tighten our belts and reduce spending and to create more room for borrowing another in other times. The Conservative, the Conservative government have long argued that austerity makes us more resilient when a crisis hits, because as we've, as they, you know, as, as they would argue we have these kind of lovely roofs that can protect us from the rains and the storms. But COVID has shown us that the roof is made up of more than just the debt to GDP ratio, believe it or not. There's lots of other risks and vulnerabilities that we haven't been protecting ourselves against, which has left us with loads of gaping holes for the rain to come pouring in when when COVID hit and it definitely did. On the austerity point, some people would argue that it would be quite difficult for the government to revert to a narrative of austerity. And claim that there's no magic money tree when they've spent the best part of a year shaking it to great effect, but we shouldn't be naive about how easy it would be to fall back on a narrative that says we have to tighten our belts to get things back on track. And again, just to emphasize we have to remember that and argue for the fact that government spending and investment creates employment and income we know this with more economic activity stimulated by government spending plus an appropriate tax system, which is crucial. The government can easily raise the revenue and pay off the debt that it's accumulated without resulting to austerity. And just a final point on this is that we also have to be careful. When we're talking about austerity, and that we don't reinforce unhelpful frames that I mentioned at the top such as the economy is a bucket that good people put into and bad people take out of, or the state budget being the same as a household one, for example, because that just kind of paved the way for lots of other really regressive economic and fiscal policies. And, you know, argued in the presentation the question of who should pay for the pandemic needs to be expanded actually to include questions such as what does paying for it actually mean right, which would mean reevaluating things like what a healthy debt to GDP ratio even is. Finally, three minutes. The last thing I wanted to kind of caution against is a the neoliberalism is dead narrative, which I've kind of heard a little bit. The considerations are sadly premature. And while I would agree that some of the values of neoliberalism have been really undermined and that the overton window has certainly shifted. We have to also remember that a lot of the government interventions have been more about work fare than welfare. The main focuses have been businesses and jobs, rather than things like mental health taking care of vulnerable communities, or investing in support for example people facing digital poverty. And I think quite aligned with the political project of neoliberalism which takes full employability as its objectives and encourages humans to see ourselves as small businesses and the economy is reducible to jobs and incomes. So we shouldn't be too quick to celebrate but the sense of collectivism mutual aid and community that covered 19 has surfaced is something that we should cling on to and that we should advocate for as we move forward. One example of an opportunity that has been presented is one of the ways that neoliberal neoliberalism kind of functions as a mode of governing is it makes us see ourselves as entrepreneurs. And that has led to increasing numbers of middle class people kind of going freelance right as distinct from precarious workers who are people on low incomes and zero contracts, but the pandemic has demonstrated to precisely that group of middle class workers who might have fallen through the cracks in the decimated so social safety net, the value of things like a secure employment contract union membership collective bargaining, not to mention sick pay and other benefits that have been really hard and we have to take advantage of that increase in solidarity to organize for collective rights so one of the projects we're doing at neon for example is around bringing together precarious workers with those kind of more traditional freelance workers to create that space for kind of collective solidarity and bargaining for better workers rights across the piece. But that's just one example of the ways in which we might utilize these learnings from the pandemic to start to chip away at the ideology of neoliberalism. And so just to wrap up I've tried to kind of lay out a few of the things that I think we need to have front of mind when we're considering a just recovery. Neoliberalism and the legacy of colonialism, a return to austerity, as well as the debate around neoliberalism and whether or not it is in fact dead. And I'd suggest that there's a lot that we can learn on this from the abolitionist movement in our approach to what comes next. So that would mean building a response that is holistic, long term and revolutionary in its practice. Of course there are lots of other the other things that we need to be aware of which you know Ben has touched on, and also lots of specific policy proposals beyond the TNI ones that others like Neff and IPPR and build back better have been advancing which I can maybe speak to a bit more but for now I'll leave it there and throw it back to you. Thank you. And thank you for that important intervention. I'm going to let Ben reply or come in again I'm going to just going to ask you to also answer the first question which is a question of more clarification from Jacinta who asks, or writes you mentioned we've done this before when you said that taxes were raised out of the two world wars, which countries were you referring to only the UK or others and how much impact did it have on the working class in these countries. So yeah, that and then reacting to Asia's intervention. Great. Yeah, firstly thanks so much for that issue that was really, I've been like scribbling down all your notes all your points because there's so much interesting stuff in there that I'm now like maybe I can shove this into the report and they probably shouldn't edit some work after you published it. All right, on the, let me maybe answer the excess profit tax one. First, yeah, just because it's a point of clarification. The access profit tax was done by the US and the UK. There might be other countries that I know of but they're the ones I'm definitely sure. So after the second world war, I think it was done in the UK. It was done in the Korean War and the first world war. It was done in the US. So yeah, these have been done in, you know, the richest countries in the world on the, the most kind of powerful and profitable companies within those countries. I don't see why we couldn't do the same thing again now in terms of how it impacted the workers movement. I mean these this was a different economic political economic regime than what we have now. I mean this was particularly I guess in the post war period. There was more of a social contracts. The US power was more established within, within the economy, you know union rates were higher were increasing rather than kind of declining, which is what we see now. There was more collective bargaining. So I do think, I don't know too much about the history exactly but I can imagine that very much these things come together then. The ability to pressure the government to do these things really does rely on having to some extent an organized working class that can push this. So I hope that answered your question. I think in response to issues points. Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't have time to go through all of them. Let me go. I think the best place to start maybe is on this question of, of austerity. I think we're really, you know, I just said that we need to be wary of the reintroduction of austerity and wary of these narratives that the kind of say that everything's changed you know the neoliberalism is over. Because the government has turned on the taps, the money taps now whatever knowledge you want to use, the public will see that actually this exists and, and they won't be able to go back or that the, the, you know, we won the argument on austerity. And I, I think this is really that there's a kind of confused response I think from like the left at the moment about how we respond to this and I kind of found that even while writing the report and writing these articles that on the one hand you have this kind of modern literary theory perspective, which is like, we don't have to do anything, we don't have to pay about the debts, we can just continue to spend as much as possible. And we can fund that with effectively monetizing the debts. No, I personally think that this, as I, you know, I should very, I think very summarized really the problems of this, you know, in a way, we can't just look at the GDP debt GDP ratio. We need a much more broader understanding of the ways in which austerity created and reinforced the preexisting inequalities. We can't just think you know when we talk about austerity isn't just about balancing the government's books. It's much broader about this idea of you know who the economy works for who has political power within the economy. That's kind of what I've tried, I guess they, that's what I'm trying, try to do with the report but it's very hard to kind of get that across in a snappy analogy that is as easy as, oh we need to fix the roof for when the rain comes or you know we need to balance the books. I know that Neff have done a lot of work over the last, you know decade thinking of alternative narratives and actually I should mentioned. Like, actually some really, some, I think summarize some of these like very well within her response. But still I still see this as a something that is maybe a weak spot that we need to, that we need to, that we need to kind of continue to work on. The issue of race. I think, I, you know, it's, it's so interesting that this year. It's just so much has happened hasn't it you know if this year you've had everything from covert even in London we've had like the massive like black lives matter marches that happened like the biggest I'm pretty sure like the biggest much as a black people in south London in the issue of the city, you know, at the same time as that all of these other great changes that are happening. I think that this is, I mean it's so optimistic I mean just to give you a personal account. My, my family member who was living in a kind of remote town in Devon, who isn't particularly. I mean, who's politically engaged but I never like actively engaging in politics went to like it really you know that there was a kind of organization of a black lives matter process there, and people went down did a diet and it just felt like it really spread in a way that was like very in light, you know very inspiring very empowering. And I think trying to, you know, any kind of proposals that we talk about here where it have to be have to be grounded in that in that on the back of those movements. I mean I do think maybe one. One thing that I should said that we need to think about as well as if part of the problem with the way in which racism persists is actually this idea of creating a kind of a subject that can kind of that is controlled and is if the fact is that the expectation of black people across the country is to do across the world is to do with the fact that they don't have like power within political processes. Maybe something I think I could do more in the report is more about the actual processes of like who sits at the table here, I mean I guess I talked a bit about this idea that if you're not at the table then you're in the menu. You shouldn't be thinking so much about specific proposals but more about the processes of kind of who actually gets to sit at the table to organize these things. Because maybe that's the way in which you actually start to change institutions like the UN and the IMF or the OECD and why in a way these, these, these changes like for example around tax evasion that we've seen haven't gone far enough. Okay, I think that's probably okay for me. Do I respond with questions or do you, what happens now? I'll choose some of the questions for you. That's the power I hold as the chair and I'll make active use of. So we have some questions from both Yanis and Sarah and I'm going to mix it up a little bit and take one from each now because we have around 15 minutes left. And so these two questions go specifically or like more specifically into the proposals. And yeah, look at them. So the first question from Yanis is, according to your proposals Ben, how should the money in climate mitigation be spent, for example to what extent should it be used for undertaking green public investment, and to what how should it be used for provision of green subsidies to people and companies. Is the nationalization of utilities and the transportation sector necessary for your proposals. So it's the first question. And then the second question I'm going to ask both of you to answer is Sarah second question which is it seems that many of the proposals. It seems that many of the proposals require forms of international coordination. What is the role of the global working class in fostering international coordination, how can solidarity between the working class in the global south and I know I actually you spoke about pretty primarily working in the UK but you might have some some insights as well to share. I'm going to throw to Ben first as well. Again, just because of the first question on on the green subsidies or green climate change proposals. Yeah, yeah. I think on the exact breakdown. I mean I haven't done research on it but the report that comes to mind is at least for the global north I mean we need to think about this is there's going to have to be different types of money. But what we spend money on is going to be different across the world. Yeah. So for example, in Europe, a lot of the money is going to be going into effectively insulating houses and things like kind of quite boring stuff but like really like really necessary stuff and if you want to see some of the things on that you know how much is this going to actually cost. There's a report by Raphael build our and Stuart leach, who are two academics from Greenwich, who look at what you'd actually need for European Green New Deal, you know where would the money go. I think that the main thing they say is actually investing in the existing stock and infrastructure. Now for the global south that's going to be, that is going to be a different thing, you know, is going to be less based on kind of updating 19th century programs and more into, hopefully, you know, being able to fund social welfare programs, being able to skip out stages of the development process so that you can move straight to renewable energy rather than having to kind of entrench more fossil fuel in infrastructure. So yeah, that would be my that would be my response to that question. Do you have something for the second as well or just how do we build international coordination. I mean, I guess I can talk a little bit from my experience of setting up this tutoring agency. I mean it's such a micro thing but I think we have to really be thinking like micro as well I mean the basis of that is we as tutors in the global south, who are part of the cooperative, they teach language courses they teach other types of courses, and they get paid effectively a global minimum wage within the cooperative so everyone in the company gets paid the same amount. And the idea is it's about redistribution redistributing resources within an organization that could kind of as a basic like could act as a as a kind of example of how other organizations and other corporate corporations could work. Now that I see, you know, this is really like the aim is to build solidarity across national lines and to have a we also have like a pay week and afford system so that basically people pay according to how much wealth and income they have. So we've been trying out examples and proposals like that. I think I'll let I should talk a little bit more about maybe the more macro side of things. Yeah. Because that that's, I mean, I'm not saying that this tuition agency is going to grow and take over take over all of global cats. Oh, we'll see. See. Yeah, I think it probably is actually quite a micro example as well in general I think that in order to kind of build better international solidarity that needs to be kind of a more concerted effort to raise a kind of collective political consciousness, whether that's a class consciousness or otherwise. And I can certainly speak to an example from the black liberation movement in the work that I do with with kin which isn't, which is an international network of black activists and generally our work there is kind of focused on on that issue on kind of raising a kind of sense of an international black diasporic political identity really and interrogating what that might look like. And so every year we do this kind of annual convening where we bring people together from all over the world, and with at least 50% coming from the global south. And our approach to that essentially is to kind of leverage our privilege and resources here in in the UK and we also organize in Europe and the US to essentially raise money from philanthropic organizations trust and donations, and then kind of attempt to redistribute those resources by using it to pay the costs of people to come from the global south to the events, which includes everything from kind of paying for visas to like, you know, all the costs of flights and, and stuff like that and it tends to mean that we have, we're able to kind of have a much more representative, and I think you know effective conversation about global black solidarity because we have such a heavy representation of people from all over the world where obviously blackness looks different and takes on, and anti blackness also takes on different manifestations. I think it is kind of the responsibility of people living in countries with with more resources that they've extracted from the global south to try and, and I guess close that loop by through these redistributive practices. And I think one of the things that's particularly difficult about it as we find it can, is that there are so many kind of racist colonial but generally oppressive kind of barriers enacted to make that difficult. So, for example, I think 20% of the people that we accepted onto the King convening last year couldn't get in because they had visas denied or they were turned away at the border, or one of them was even put into detention when they arrived. So, and that's just just basically because of being identified as a political activist, who is black from a country in the global south. So it's also just incredibly difficult to do that work. And the last thing I would say is, of course, COVID has emphasized the ways in which it might be more possible because of doing things online to do some of that kind of international solidarity work, but we are then also faced with the question of kind of digital solidarity and how to address that. So it's complex, but I think there are things that can and should be done. Thank you. Thank you both. We have eight minutes left and I'm going to push to more questions on you because there are two questions on narratives that kind of go hand in hand. And you both sort of touched upon, like Ben you mentioned that it's all about also showing that we have the resources and part of the things have been done before. And so the first question I'm going to give you is the first question from Sarah Stefano, which is, do you think that a narrative on the responsibilities for and courses of the pandemic could be useful for informing proposals on how to pay for the pandemic globally. And the second question is from Alice who says, I issue really helpfully highlighted some of the unhelpful yet dominant narratives in the UK and elsewhere about the economy and balancing the budget, etc. I wonder if you could provide some reflections on how we as citizens and activists can work to reshape these narratives. I mean you can fight about who was first. If someone has an immediate I. Yeah, I mean I just because we literally wrote this report so it's all quite fresh in my mind in terms of particularly on the second one how we might reshape some of the narratives I think at the new economy organizers network where I work. There's a whole section of the organization dedicated to this. And one of the things that we have found incredibly useful is around kind of trying to move away from metaphors that invoke, you know, this kind of idea of the economy as a bucket which crucially we can't control. And there's something that kind of exists out there and that we, we have no say in, in who puts into the bucket or who takes out of it and how soon things will run out and whatever. And that metaphor and that way of thinking about the economy has really far reaching implications for everything from tax policy to welfare spending like it really limits what's possible. And I think what we found to be really effective is trying to reframe it around the idea of the economy, as for example a computer. And we've kind of tested this metaphor of you know the economy is a computer and the kind of logins or the passwords have at the moment been kind of stolen that and they're being used, you know by some bad actors to to program the entire system to make it just work for them. What we actually need to do is kind of get access to those passwords, reprogram the whole thing and make it work for everyone. And that's something that we found with the focus interviews focus groups that we did an interviews that people could really get behind like, and it really started to shift so when we then ask them questions about things like welfare spending, foreign aid policy and things like that. They were kind of able to see it as something like, oh okay yeah well if we did have the codes to the computer, we could put a bit more in that pot or we could change this or we could do that and they felt so much more empowered and like they had ownership, rather than when we asked them those questions before offering them that metaphor, they were very much like well there's nothing that we can do and there's only a certain amount of resources. They were inclined to be quite anti progressive in the policies that they would be on board with. So that's just one example but I would really encourage folks to kind of to pick up that report, which I put a link to in the chat because it has a bunch of other ones as well. Maybe I'll answer the other question, which, if I understood it correctly is, you know, should we be using a narrative around the, like, should we be kind of thinking about the causes of the pandemic or at least the people that have like profited during the pandemic is a way of focusing our proposals. I think it's a good place to start, but it's not going to go far enough basically. So, definitely the pandemic exposes some of the problems that existed before is, as we both discussed. I mean one clear one is wealth inequality, which I guess I spoke quite a lot about in the report because that's also what I'm doing some research on. If you just focus a policy based on the wealth inequality that has been created since the pandemic. You, you're not going to get particularly, you know, you're not going to be able to really tackle the underlying issue because we know that wealth inequality has been rising since the 1980s. As I said, we can you know you see the fact that some of the kind of shocking stats around wealth inequality that come out during the pandemic, I think do cut through to people, and that can be used as a basis to then argue for wider wealth taxes. One of the classic, one of the classic things I've heard repeated is the fact that if Jeff Bezos gave $100,000 to every single Amazon employee, since, if Jeff Bezos gave $100,000 to every single Amazon employee, he would still have more wealth than he would have at the start of the year. There's just like some insane, you know, you can use something like that the fact that there's been this kind of billionaire bonanza to show people that clearly the system is unfair and unjust and needs tackling. But I think we need to go beyond just saying, let's tax the windfall profits of the wealthy because we want you know we need to be taxing the accumulation of wealth at the top that has existed existed before that. I think you could say a similar stuff for corporation corporations as well you know we should be using this as an opportunity to build something much more long lasting than just like these windfall ideas. Great. Thank you. Thank you both. Okay, there's one question that hasn't been answered and I think maybe then you can answer that really quickly and then I will end this whole thing immediately afterwards. And which is Janice's second question, or he just asks, will the value of the estimated financing needs be lower if the multiplier effects of government spending on income and tax revenues is taken into account. Yes or no. The tax revenues will be higher. I would say. Again, like the dynamics of this stuff is like, it's going to be hard to model. Taxes or some of the proposals are going to affect the revenues from the other ones you know if you tax a financial transaction tax and a wealth tax on the richest people who predominantly hold financial assets both of those assets have been taxed twice can you really do that. I think you can in the way that I've said it out but it's might have some kind of reduction in the tax receipts that I've or in the proposals to raise money that I've, I've set out. And that said, I haven't even thought about, you know, I haven't put in the multiplier effect so that I think would would increase the amount of economic activity and therefore GDP and therefore tax receipts that we would, we would get so it'd be an interesting thing to look into. I know Janice is into like muddling so maybe he can teach me how, how that could be, how that could be done. Future collaboration probably hopefully can work that. Right, that concludes the session for today. I'm just before you all leave. I'm going to mention the like next week's webinar, which will be on the flexible seamstress global South suppliers and the new economic imperialism. It will be same time thing place, and the speaker will be in terms of one day who's the author of value change value change the new economic imperialism and is from Illinois State University and the discuss it will be Susan Newman from open university. And then all that remains is to say thank you to all the questions and obviously a huge thank you to both Ben and Asia for that important interesting presentation slash intervention. I've one learned a lot, and have all the energy to go do something active to make sure that we go to adjust transition from here. So, thank you everyone and thank you to the organizers. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Bye.