As most of the world’s population suffered under a deadly pandemic, the world’s 10 richest people doubled their wealth while the world’s billionaires added $5 trillion to their collective wealth, a new report by Oxfam finds.
Billionaires have been reaping huge benefits from the global economic system since the start of the pandemic. report’s authors wrote. Billionaire wealth has increased from an $8.6 trillion to $13.8 Trillion level since March 2021. Previous reports have shown that only the 10 richest people account for this increase. hundreds of billions of dollarsThat is why wealth has grown. This is a higher growth in billionaire wealth compared to the last 14 years.
“A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began,” the report reads. “The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty.”
The report’s authors wrote that such growing economic inequality is a result of purposeful choices by government officials.
“This is not by chance, but choice: ‘economic violence’ is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people,” the report continued, noting that women and non-white people are particularly susceptible to poverty and its deleterious effects.
They estimate that 21,300 people each day are dying partly as a result of inequality – or about one person every four seconds – an estimate that they characterize as “highly conservative” based on poverty-related factors like food insecurity, a lack of health care and gender-based violence.
The report highlights that Black Americans have been particularly affected by the pandemic. According to the report, 3.4 Million Black Americans in the United States would still be living today if they had the same lifespan as their white counterparts. The pandemic has made this number even more severe.
The report also states that the climate crisis is a growing concern. Oxfam estimates that 231,000 people in poor countries will die each year due to the climate crisis by 2030. Similar to previous estimatesEven though this is the case, other research has shown that extreme weather due to climate crisis is already killing millions of peopleEvery year.
The report, which was published in time for the Davos Agenda 2022 economic forum, is harsh in its analysis on the mechanisms that perpetuate extreme inequality.
“There is no shortage of money” to help reverse this trend, the report authors wrote. “That lie died when governments released $16 trillion to respond to the pandemic. There is only a shortage of courage to tackle inequality, and the wealth and might of the rich and the powerful, and a shortage of the imagination needed to break free from the failed, narrow straitjacket of extreme neoliberalism.”
Oxfam recommends an immediate tax on billionaires’ pandemic gains in order to provide aid to people in poverty. For example, a 99 percent tax on the pandemic wealth gains by the 10 richest men in this world would raise $812 million for this purpose.
U.S. progressives reiterated their call for taxing the rich in reaction to Oxfam’s report. “Tax the billionaires. Invest in the working class,” tweeted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
Even if wealth taxes were only levied on American billionaires, they could have transformative effects. A report by the Americans for Tax Fairness found that the U.S.’s nearly 750 billionaires gained $1 trillion in wealth in 2021 – a tax-free gain of 25 percent. Their combined wealth is estimated at $5.1 trillion, which is enough to fund the United States of America. Democrats’ extinct Build Back Better ActIt can be repeated twice.
