At a Vatican seminar Wednesday, Pope Francis declared that tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin” and called for international wealth redistribution.
“Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the Social Justice Pope told the participants, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”
“Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” he added. The Pope went on to repeat his conviction that poverty is on the rise worldwide and “the poor increase around us.” Last June, he said that “the poor are always poorer, and today they are poorer than ever.”
No. A Brookings Institution report in 2018 noted that the world is currently experiencing “the lowest prevalence of extreme poverty ever recorded in human history — less than 8 percent.”