Last year, Oxfam used data from Credit Suisse to determine that 92 billionaires controlled $1 trillion of the world’s wealth, an amount equivalent to what the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet possess. Now, Oxfam reports that just 80 of the world’s wealthiest humans control $1.9 trillion, double what they controlled in 2009 and slightly more than what the bottom 50% of the world’s population can scrape together.
According to Oxfam’s most recent report [PDF], those 80 billionaires saw their collective wealth increase by $600 billion from 2010 to 2014. Michael Bloomberg’s wealth jumped by 22% in just one year, increasing from $27 billion in 2013 to $33 billion in 2014; the increase is enough to pay for more than half of the city’s share of de Blasio's affordable housing plan.
As for the world’s richest 1%, they control 48% of all wealth on the planet; the richest 20% controls 46.5%, leaving 80% of the world’s entire population to share a paltry 5.5% of all global wealth. One in nine people live on less than $1.25 per day.
“Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?” Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International says in a statement.
“Business as usual for the elite isn’t a cost free option - failure to tackle inequality will set the fight against poverty back decades. The poor are hurt twice by rising inequality - they get a smaller share of the economic pie and because extreme inequality hurts growth, there is less pie to be shared around.”
Tomorrow night, President Obama will propose a tax on large banks, higher taxes on capital gains, and eliminating the "trust-fund loophole," so he can pay for moderate tax breaks on the middle class. The proposal is doomed to fail.
