Can a Deeply Unequal Nation Totally Reverse Course?
Colombia’s new president has just placed a bet on greater equality. His nation’s rich can’t see him collecting.
BLOGGING OUR GREAT DIVIDE
AUGUST 25, 2022
by Sam Pizzigati
The alarm bells are — sort of — ringing, Bloomberg reports, in Colombia’s most “fashionable neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellin.”
Colombia’s newly elected progressive president has just proposed a wealth tax, on his first day in office no less. In Latin America, the world’s most unequal region, an egalitarian move like that would normally have a nation’s most privileged enraged and frothing. And some of that frothing certainly is showing up since Gustavo Petro, Columbia’s first left president, proposed his new levy on grand fortunes. A top exec with Colombia’s largest financial conglomerate now even says he sees “a significant risk” the nation’s stock market “will practically disappear” under Petro’s reign.
But Colombia’s rich are, by and large, showing little of such hysterics. Simply put, Colombia’s wealthiest just don’t feel their new president can deliver any real squeeze on their considerable net worths. Petro’s “lack of a congressional majority” and Colombia’s powerful constitutional court and central bank, as the Financial Times has comfortingly informed global investors, will most likely “temper any radical impulses” on the new administration’s part.
The new Petro administration, meanwhile, has ample cause for radicalism. In 2019, the last full pre-pandemic year, no major market-based economy in the world had a higher level of income inequality than Colombia. And Colombia’s inequality has remained remarkably entrenched for generations, mainly because the rich in Colombia have been able to transfer a greater share of their riches to their offspring than the rich of any other nation. One result: Colombia’s top 1 percent hold an astounding 81 percent of their society’s private land, well above the 52 percent Latin American regional average.
More:
https://inequality.org/great-divide/can-a-deeply-unequal-nation-totally-reverse-course/
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