Experts in economics and human relations are thinking about changes that are likely to support our “new normal” lives after our journey through the Covid-19 crisis.
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| Journey through Covid-19 |
Alex Hemingway, an economist and public finance policy analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives BC Office, writes that an excess profits tax is needed to prevent profiteering amid COVID-19. People and businesses all over the country and the world are hurting as large parts of the economy have shut down to help stop the spread of COVID-19. But a subset of businesses will see a spike in profits, including in big tech, e-commerce and logistics, and cleaning products, as well as vendors of scarce goods who engage in price gouging. No one should make windfall profits from a crisis causing so much suffering, particularly when billions in public dollars are flowing to keep businesses afloat.
Two leading economists in the United States are now calling for an excess profits tax of the type previously imposed during World War I and II in countries including Canada, the US and Britain. A wartime-style excess profits tax would help prevent profiteering amid COVID-19, discourage abuse of government support programs for business, tamp down on price gouging, and raise public revenues from large, profitable corporations that are booming during the crisis. As US President Wilson declared in 1918, “The profiteering that cannot be got at the restraints of conscience and love of country can be got at by taxation.”1
Austen Ivereigh, writing for the Tablet, was curious to know if Pope Francis saw the crisis and the economic devastation it is wreaking as a chance for an ecological conversion, for reassessing priorities and lifestyles. Ivereigh asked him concretely whether it was possible that we might see in the future an economy that – to use his words – was more “human” and less “liquid”.
You ask me about conversion. Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato Si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings. This is the opportunity for conversion.Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it. We have lost the contemplative dimension; we have to get it back at this time.2
Our economy and our attitude to production and consumption are likely to change as we move through the Covid crisis. Contemplation of necessary change now may lead to significant action in the months ahead.
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