wealth inequality

Richest 1% Took 2/3rds Of Global Wealth Since 2020

January 18, 2023 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy Report. Resistance Report Global Economy, Poverty, Taxes, wealth inequality

In the past decade, the richest 1% of people on Earth sucked up half of all new wealth. In 2020 and 2021, the richest 1% took nearly two-thirds of all new wealth – six times greater than the wealth made by the poorest 90% of the global population. “Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million”, wrote Oxfam. In the meantime, global poverty is getting worse, not better. These shocking statistics were published in “Survival of the Richest“, a report authored by Oxfam, an international humanitarian organization dedicated to fighting poverty and hunger. The document details how, while hundreds of billions of working people across the planet suffer from hunger, insecurity, rising costs of living, and decreasing wages, “The very richest have become dramatically richer and corporate profits have hit record highs, driving an explosion of inequality”.

Oxfam Wants To More Than Double The Tax Rate On Our Richest

January 16, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

Every January, the deep pockets of our world who see themselves as deep thinkers gather high up in the Alps to contemplate the world’s most pressing problems at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. Every January, analysts at Oxfam, the global group that champions economic justice, take this annual Davos moment to report out just how much our world’s richest contribute to those problems – and just how many of those problems they outright create. This year’s Oxfam Davos-time report, Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality, adds to this pattern a fascinating new twist. Just what do we have to do, this Oxfam paper essentially asks, to keep our super-rich from being super? Central to Oxfam’s answer: a call for a tax rate “of at least 75 percent on all personal income” of those making over $5 million a year, basically those who sit in our world’s wealthiest 0.1 percent.

Inequality In Annual Earnings Worsens In 2021

January 2, 2023 Elise Gould and Jori Kandra, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Wages, wealth inequality

Rising wage inequality and slow and uneven growth in real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages for the vast majority of workers have been defining features of the U.S. labor market for most of the last 40 or so years. In only about 10 years since 1979 did most workers see any consistent positive wage growth: in the tight labor market of the late 1990s and in the five years leading up to the pre-pandemic labor market peak in 2019 (Gould 2020). Some low-wage workers have experienced disproportionate wage gains in the current business cycle—gains that even beat out high inflation (Gould and Kandra 2022). However, the latest data on annual earnings from the Social Security Administration (SSA 2022a) show that the very top continues to pull away and amass a larger share of the earnings pie, while the bottom 90% continues to fall further behind.

Tax The Rich? We Did That Once

December 7, 2022 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! Class Struggle, History, Taxes, wealth inequality

Once upon a time, the United States seriously taxed the nation’s rich. You remember that time? Probably not. To have a personal memory of that tax-the-rich era, you now have to be well into your seventies. Back at the tail-end of that era, in the early 1960s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent tax rate on income in the top tax bracket. That top rate had been hovering around 90 percent for the previous two decades. In the 1950s, a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made no move to knock it down. The rich felt those taxes. The high life struggled. Consider what happened to one fabled emblem of that era’s excess, the nation’s first-ever penthouse.

A Promising Challenge To The World’s Richest Man

November 23, 2022 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Resist! Delaware, Elon Musk, Legal System, wealth inequality

A good day’s work for a good day’s pay. Should this age-old wisdom define how our workplaces here in the 21st century go about compensating work? More to the point: Should our corporations start applying this common-sense standard across the board, to both front-line workers and our most powerful corporate CEOs? Kathaleen McCormick will soon let us know, in a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe — Elon Musk — more than a little bit uneasy. McCormick currently serves as the chancellor — top judge — in what amounts to Corporate America’s top go-to judicial body, Delaware’s little-known Court of Chancery. Why does corporate law so often come down to what judges in Delaware say that law should be?

Vectors Of Inflation

November 8, 2022 Radhika Desai, New Left Review. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, wealth inequality

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell’s recent speech at the Jackson Hole conference, delivered to an audience of central bankers from around the world, was a highly anticipated event. He arrived there a chastened man, having previously claimed that US inflation was a transitory phenomenon while implementing the lax monetary policies that many blamed for its recent surge. Could he now pull off a ‘soft landing’, bringing inflation back down from its forty-year high of 9.1% to the desired 2%, without causing a recession? Central banks have various tools at their disposal for managing inflation: higher rates, quantitative tightening (i.e. selling assets to reduce liquidity in the system) and managing expectations about future monetary policy through ‘forward guidance’.

Wealthiest 10% Responsible For Nearly 50% Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

October 3, 2022 Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch. Educate! Carbon emissions, climate crisis, greenhouse gases, wealth inequality

A new study has highlighted the inequality underriding the climate crisis. The paper, published in Nature Sustainability Thursday, looked at the difference in per-capita emissions across the global economic spectrum between 1990 and 2019. During this time, the top one percent of emitters were responsible for nearly a quarter of all emissions contributing to the climate crisis and the top 10 percent are now responsible for nearly half of the total. “In my benchmark estimates, I find that the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total,” the study’s sole author Lucas Chancel of the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab wrote. “Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total.”

US Is Becoming A ‘Developing Country’ On Global Rankings

September 19, 2022 Kathleen Frydl, The Conversation. Educate! Democracy, Sustainable, United Nations, wealth inequality

The United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list. In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries. The U.S. is also now considered a “flawed democracy,” according to The Economist’s democracy index. As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems.

Can A Deeply Unequal Nation Totally Reverse Course?

September 1, 2022 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Educate! Colombia, Gustavo Petro, Taxes, wealth inequality

The alarm bells are — sort of — ringing, Bloomberg reports, in Colombia’s most “fashionable neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellin.” Colombia’s newly elected progressive president has just proposed a wealth tax, on his first day in office no less. In Latin America, the world’s most unequal region, an egalitarian move like that would normally have a nation’s most privileged enraged and frothing. And some of that frothing certainly is showing up since Gustavo Petro, Columbia’s first left president, proposed his new levy on grand fortunes. A top exec with Colombia’s largest financial conglomerate now even says he sees “a significant risk” the nation’s stock market “will practically disappear” under Petro’s reign.

The Economy Should Serve People – Not Vice Versa

August 23, 2022 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Educate! Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, wealth inequality

The economy’s job is to work for people. It is not the job of people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the economy. The subconscious feeling drummed into all of us that we should feel some sense of collective pride for being ground into dust in service of economic growth is a sick bit of indoctrination that is stubbornly hard to escape. The simple step of asking what the economy is doing for us — rather than what our lives are contributing to the economy — can go a long way toward reframing how we all think about this. They say that behind every fortune is a crime; likewise, behind every mainstream economic analysis is a set of poisonous assumptions that exist to tranquilize us. Consider the problem of inflation. It’s rising around the world. The growing consensus in the financial world is that the era of low inflation is gone for good, because the era of globalization that enabled it is coming to an end.

Radical Taxation

August 20, 2022 Vanessa Williamson, Dissent Magazine. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Taxes, wealth inequality

This spring, legislators of both parties, from Connecticut to Georgia, responded to higher energy prices with “gas tax holidays,” temporary tax reductions for consumers that provide an additional windfall to the immensely profitable fossil fuel industry at precisely the moment when we should be ending the global warming economy. Thirty-six years after Grover Norquist first introduced the “taxpayer protection pledge”—by which thousands of legislators have committed to oppose all tax increases—American policymaking remains trapped in an anti-tax paradigm that leaves us unable to cope with the crises we face. Given that the stakes are the habitability of the planet, paradigms might seem a relatively minor concern. But conservative tax opposition can lead us to imagine barriers to climate action that are in fact no great obstacle at all.

America, Land Of The Dying?

August 10, 2022 Lynn Parramore, Institute For New Economic Thinking. Educate! Democracy, Mortality, Neoliberalism, wealth inequality

With its economic and military might, America is hard to beat on technological wonders, space exploration, and top-notch universities. But when it comes to health, a fundamental prerequisite to a fulfilling life, the US isn’t delivering and hasn’t been for a long time. Researchers now find that the big picture of health failings is even graver than we already knew. Piles of studies have called attention to the fact that in the country ranking number one in healthcare spending per capita, people are living shorter lives, feeling more depressed, and are more likely to skip treatment due to cost than in many developed nations. In a performance ranking of 11 high-income countries compiled by the Commonwealth Fund in 2021, the American healthcare system came in dead last, with the worst outcomes of any of the nations studied.

New Report: Gilded Giving 2022

July 19, 2022 Olivia Alperstein, Institute for Policy Studies. Educate! Class Struggle, Nonprofits, Philanthropy, wealth inequality

We estimate in Gilded Giving 2022 that if foundations had a 10 percent minimum payout and DAFs had a three-year mandated payout between 2018 and 2020, at least $193 billion in additional donations would have flowed to charities. “As wealth concentrates in fewer hands, it causes troubling distortions in the charity sector,” noted Chuck Collins, director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of the report. “When wealthy donors can claim big tax deductions for charitable giving to private foundations that they control in perpetuity, it allows them to opt out of paying their fair share in taxes to support the systems on which we all depend. This effectively enables already powerful multi-millionaires and billionaires to maintain a taxpayer-subsidized form of private power and influence.”

The Language We Use To Talk About Inequality, Power, And Class Matters

July 9, 2022 Celine-Marie Pascale, Inequality.org. Strategize! Class Struggle, Language, Ruling Class, wealth inequality

In the US, discourses of inequality seldom are rooted to the nation’s long history of violent class conflict. Two examples of that history which come quickly to mind are the 1892 Homestead steel strike in Pittsburgh, which earned a place in labor history as the Homestead Massacre and the 1921 coal strike known as the Battle of Blair Mountain in which workers saw their homes bombed as they faced army troops. These were extreme but not unique moments in the history of labor. Oppressive working conditions and inadequate pay have never been an accident or the result of an oversight — they have been for profit.

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