“For every super-rich person taxed, 100 Brazilians will benefit” Read full speech of Fernando Haddad

My position here, of course, as a member of President Lula's government, obliges me to talk a little about the work being done by the government, rather than about the intellectual pretensions that I and my colleagues might have about the challenges that are being faced at the moment.

So, I believe that my participation here should be limited to shedding light on Brazil's challenges in a challenging world. For a few weeks now, we have been living through a very unusual situation. The growth of the extreme right, especially in the West, has caused a lot of concern.

Europe, the United States, and South America have suffered from the progression of reactionary forces coming to power and jeopardizing the possibilities of reform in order to seek an economic and geopolitical balance and the pursuit of social justice.

These are increasingly challenging issues. And I believe that, in this complex context, Brazil has managed to raise proposals both externally, especially in the presidency of the G20, and internally, which, if they are not discussed, so to speak, are proposals that mobilize minds and hearts in the right direction, in the search for a better world.

At the G20, Brazil tried to put the issue of combating hunger and inequality at the center of the debate, on the one hand, and the issue of the challenge of climate change and new sources of funding to tackle this socio-environmental panorama, on the other.

We are in a world where a large number of people still don't eat enough calories to survive in dignity. We are at a time of climate change which puts food security at the center of attention. And sources of funding are increasingly scarce.

Because today you have a highly capitalized private sector and a highly deficient public sector, with increasingly large debt issuances. So we came up with the idea of taxing the super-rich.

We carried out an assessment with some researchers, such as Nobel Prize winner Esther Duflo, the team of Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, and we addressed the issue of taxing the 3,000 richest families on the planet to the G20. These 3,000 families, who could fit into a condominium in São Paulo, hold 15 trillion dollars in wealth.

And our idea, which was launched at the G20, was to levy just 2% on the wealth of these families every year. This would constitute a global public fund of 300 billion dollars a year to fight hunger and climate change. It's not a huge amount, given that the richest country in the world invests more than 1 trillion dollars in defense. But it was a good start.

300 billion dollars is something quite significant to start addressing the rescue of the African continent, to tackle the indebtedness of African countries, not only, but above all, to face the challenge of promoting an acceleration of the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

And I think that this value would indicate a path for humanity to pursue nobler goals than the current ones. It would indicate a path that we need to have global governance and that we need to overcome the Bretton Woods institutions, which were not designed to face the challenges posed today.

The post-war period is a completely different situation to the one we are living in today, and the design, the architecture of Bretton Woods is not suited to the challenges we are facing today.

And we managed to approve, within the framework of the G20, a communiqué with these principles. Obviously, we're talking about a pre-Trump moment, pre-Trump's election, still in the Biden administration.

But the fact is that today, the official G20 document enshrines these guidelines that we have to have a global fund to tackle inequalities between countries, inequalities between citizens and climate change, ecological transformation. It's stated in the document.

Domestically, where this idea originated, we are trying to act in the same way. With the political difficulties that are well known. 

We have a very conservative Congress. It's a progressive government, with a broad front, because the democratic right is part of our government. But it's a broad front progressive government that has a very conservative Congress. So we have to navigate this territory. In other words, with a very big challenge of approving the measures in Congress.

And what have we addressed to Congress? We addressed several laws that promote ecological transformation, several laws that support very significant income transfer programs. Brazil has a 50% clean energy matrix and a 90% clean electricity matrix.

We have the largest income transfer programs in our history and one of the largest on the planet. We have provided legal support so that these programs don't have continuity problems. When we took office with 33 million people suffering from hunger, we managed to reduce that number to 8 million in two years. And we believe that we will take Brazil off the hunger map by the end of President Lula's term.

What's more, a little over a month ago we sent a law to Congress that simply taxes 141,000 Brazilians. We are in our fifth government. And only in this fifth government have we gathered enough knowledge and courage to send Congress a law that is obvious, but which we haven't thought of proposing until now.

141,000 Brazilians will now be taxed with the minimum income tax. Taxing these 141,000 Brazilians would exempt 10 million Brazilians who earn up to 5,000 reais a month in salary and reduce the income tax of another 5 million Brazilians who earn between 5 and 7 thousand.

So, for every super-rich Brazilian, who earns more than 1 million a year, you will allow 100 Brazilians to benefit, 2/3 with an income tax exemption and 1/3 with a reduction in what they pay today.

We are talking about one of the 10 largest economies in the world and we are talking about one of the 10 worst income distributions in the world. This is the paradox of the Brazilian economy. We are among the 10 largest economies, but we are among the 10 most unequal. And this is the paradox of many economies in the world. It's not specific to Brazil.

There are many countries with extremely high income inequality that can use the example that Brazil is setting right now to create the conditions to fight inequality, fight hunger, fight poverty and face the challenge of climate change.

Not just through the generation of clean energy, but through a range of technologies that are being developed around the world, particularly in Brazil, in the areas of biofuels and our relationship with nature, which put us on another level in the prospective sense of looking for economically viable and ecologically sustainable alternatives to face the challenges that lie ahead.

I'll end by saying this: for some, quite rightly, these proposals may seem unambitious. And I believe that they are indeed unambitious. However, in a world of few ideas, we have to consider that they are important steps forward.

Thank you very much.