Oxfam tells us that:

Food prices, which are up more than 30% over the past year on average, are likely to push more than 263 million more people into acute poverty than before the pandemic. That would take the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day to 860 million by the end of the year.

This is not wholly and precisely true. The $1.90 a day measure of that extreme, abject, poverty is the value of consumption. It isn’t cash income, it’s value of consumption. Most of those abjectly poor are in fact subsistence peasants. That means they produce their own food and eat their own production of their own food. If food prices rise then the value of their consumption of their own production rises.

No, this isn’t true of all of those 860 million but it is so of a large portion of them. They are food producers on whatever tiny scale. Therefore rising food prices increase the value of their consumption.

If your analysis starts out getting matters so abjectly wrong then your solutions are also likely to be more than a little ropey.

Oxfam is calling for a tax of 90% on excess profits134 on a temporary basis, to capture the windfall profits of corporations across all industries; this will reduce today’s profiteering and create significant funds for investment. In September 2020, Oxfam estimated that such a tax on just 32 super-profitable corporations during the COVID-19 pandemic could have generated $104bn in revenue.

As Maya Forstater has pointed out, global tax revenues are of the order of $23 trillion. An increase in such tax revenues of 0.45% - well, that’s going to solve a lot, isn’t it?

Oxfam started out with the simple aim of getting food to those who were hungry. Now it has an equally simple message, more tax. It’s not obvious that this is an improvement in the message being proferred. But then that long march through the institutions has been going on for a long time, hasn’t it?