Digital Desk: The world’s 10 richest men massively increased their wealth during the covid-19 pandemic, said a report released by advocacy group Oxfam.
While the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men has been more than doubled between March 2020 and November 2021, the earnings of about 99 per cent of people around the world plummeted during the same time, and more than 160 million people were plunged into poverty, according to the Oxfam research.
Based on Forbes’ real-time data on billionaires, the poverty and economic justice advocacy group computed the ultra-wealthy elite’s gains. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault & family, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, and Warren Buffett were the wealthiest men in the world.
According to Oxfam’s data, worldwide, 99 percent’s declining incomes were sourced from World Bank data.
As per the calculations of Oxfam, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has increased since the start of the covid-19 pandemic than it has in the last 14 years.
“Billionaires have had a great pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy. Still, much of it ended up in the pockets of billionaires who profited from the stock market’s upswing,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher.
Bucher went on to say that even if the world’s 10 wealthiest men lost 99 percent of their wealth, they would still be wealthier than 99 percent of the world’s population.
According to Federal Reserve data, the wealthiest one percent of households in the United States own more than half of all publicly listed stock on the market, while the lowest half possess less than one percent.
On the other hand, the labour market and economy as a whole are still sputtering; the stock market has risen sharply since March 2020, the report said.
Further, Oxfam added that people are dying due to a lack of healthcare access, malnutrition, and other factors. To remedy these lethal imbalances, the group proposes a tax on the ultra-rich.
According to Bucher, Taxation is one of the most important methods to begin “righting the brutal wrongs of this grotesque inequity.”
The research proposing a new tax on the worlds wealthiest comes after a ProPublica investigation into the taxes of billionaires last year revealed that the ultra-rich can avoid paying taxes on their wealth gains by using legal loopholes.
According to the ProPublica research, while the normal American household paid 14 percent of their income in federal taxes, the wealthiest 25 Americans had an average so-called “true tax rate” of just 3.4 percent of the amount their wealth rose a year between 2014 and 2018. This was largely due to the fact that they kept their reported income, and thus their reported income tax, to a fraction of their net worth and kept the majority of their wealth in stocks, which are only taxed when they are sold.
The Oxfam research cites significant disparities in tax rates and advocates for billionaires to pay taxes on their wealth gains every year, whether or not they are realized.
While the idea of a billionaire’s tax has gained traction in Washington and elsewhere in recent years, particularly in the wake of the epidemic, however, its implementation has been difficult. Based on the definition of income, critics argue that taxes on unrealized profits are unlawful.
Meanwhile, Oxfam experts see a tax on the wealthy as a necessary and clear method to confront the pandemic’s “deadly inequality.”
“Taxing the wealthiest is one of the most powerful instruments we have to fight this level of flagrant and deadly inequality,” said Abby Maxman, the president of Oxfam America.
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