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Last Saturday I was invited to Strasbourg to the refreshing European Youth Event (EYE) along with more than 7,000 young people coming from all 28 European Union Member States. In a sunny and hot Alsace, our member the European Youth Forum (YFJ) organised one of its debates in a circus tent called the “magic mirror” on the topic of “Europe for the happy few or social inclusion for all?” There, I heard from speakers, participants and from YFJ’s report “Excluding youth: a threat to our future” about an alarming situation faced by people who just so happen to be young. They are over-represented in categories such as poverty, unemployment and poorly paid jobs, and they lack access to minimum income support. There was a shared feeling at the event that something has to change, but there are numerous barriers preventing us from making huge leaps in this area. One Member of the European Parliament said that Europe will be able to tackle these challenges only after creating wealth. However, is it true that there is not already sufficient wealth in Europe to address the social distress of our youth?

Leaving YFJ’s circus tent, I felt like I had just witnessed the proverbial disappearing rabbit magic trick – wealth being the rabbit and the hat being the pre-70s traditional labour market. In the same way we are meant to believe that the rabbit has disappeared from the hat, somehow wealth has also disappeared from the labour market which continues to be considered as the source of financing for our social protection system. But the thing is that we all know that the rabbit has not vanished. It has just been moved away while our attention was focused on the hat.

It is true that wealth is no longer as rampant in the labour market as it used to be. Since my birth in the 70s I can see that, because of the high unemployment rate, and the increasing number of pensioners compared to the lower number of contributors, our social protection systems have been curtailed due to the fact that the traditional way of taxing the labour market can no longer finance our social protection the way it used to do.

But has wealth vanished from our societies? According to the International Monetary Fund, the EU is the largest or second largest wealthiest economy in the world. So wealth must exist, but it’s distributed in a different way. According to Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, the wealthiest ten percent of people own sixty percent of the national wealth in most European countries, in particular in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. There have recently been many questions circulating on how this wealth is taxed to contribute to our common good. The Panama Papers scandal this year and LuxLeaks last year show that part of this wealth has been directed to tax havens, with people making the most of loopholes in tax regulation. The University of Berkeley’s Gabriel Zucman found that more than $2,600 billion worth of EU money is kept in offshore accounts, which represents a 78 billion dollar loss in tax revenue. This is why Social Platform wants tax justice – to ensure adequate revenues for all. For too long now there has been a disproportionate focus on chasing social benefit abusers rather than tax avoiders when in fact there is more income to gain from the latter. In the UK it is estimated that £34 billion are missing each year due to tax evasion.

While my generation has been hoodwinked into looking for the rabbit in the hat, I want all of us today to stand up against this illusion and ensure that wealth is used for the benefit of all.

Let’s engage!

Pierre Baussand, Director