Elites are gathering at the Swiss ski resort as extreme wealth and extreme poverty have risen simultaneously for the first time in 25 years. “While ordinary people make daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have surpassed even their wildest dreams. Just two years later, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires: a great 1920s boom for the world’s richest.”said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.
“Taxing big corporations and the super-rich is the way out of today’s overlapping crises. It’s time to demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the very rich result in their wealth somehow trickling down to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn’t lift all boats, just super yachts,” he added.
Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth. During the years of the pandemic and cost of living crisis since 2020, $26 trillion (63%) of all new wealth was captured by the 1%, while $16 trillion (37%) went to the rest of the world combined .
How the wealth of billionaires increased
The fortunes of billionaires have increased by $2.7 billion a day. This adds to a decade of record gains: the number and wealth of billionaires have doubled in the last ten years.
Billion-dollar wealth increased in 2022 with rapidly increasing food and energy gains. The report shows that 95 food and energy corporations have more than doubled their profits by 2022. They made $306 billion in windfall profits and paid out $257 billion (84 percent) of that to wealthy shareholders.
The walton dynastyowner of half of Walmart, received 8,500 million dollars during the last year. the billionaire Indian Gautam Adani, owner of the main energy corporations, has seen this wealth grow by 42 billion (46 percent) only in 2022. Excessive corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. At the same time, at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation outpaces wages, and more than 820 million people, roughly one in ten people on Earth, go hungry. Women and girls often eat the least and make up almost 60% of the world’s hungry population.
The World Bank alert
The World Bank says we are likely seeing the largest increase in global inequality and poverty since World War II. Entire countries are facing bankruptcy, and the poorest countries now spend four times as much paying off debts to wealthy creditors as they do on health care, According to the report.
New request for wealth tax
Elon Muskone of the richest men in the world, paid a “real tax rate” of around 3% between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, earns $80 a month and pays a 40 percent tax rate, the report contrasts.
India’s richest 1% now owns more than 40% of the country’s total wealth, while the poorest half of the population accounts for just 3%, according to Survival of The Richest, the annual study on inequality.
According to the paper, India’s billionaires grew from 102 to 166 in 2020 and since the start of the pandemic in November 2022, they have seen their wealth increase by 121% every day.
During 2022, the wealth of Gautam Adani, the country’s richest billionaire and the world’s second-richest man, grew by 46%, while the total ownership of the 100 richest reached $660 billion.
At the same time, the organization points outalmost 64% of the total Goods and Services Tax (Indian VAT) is paid by the poorest 50% of the population, while only 3% is collected by the richest 10%.
Source: Ambito
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