Summary
Oxfam’s 2024 inequality report revealed a record $2 trillion increase in billionaire wealth, reaching $15 trillion, while global poverty rates remain stagnant.
The top 1% own 45% of all wealth, and 44% of people live on less than $6.85 daily.
Oxfam predicts five trillionaires within a decade, citing inheritance and cronyism as key wealth drivers. Elon Musk may become the first trillionaire by 2027.
Oxfam calls for tax reform, monopoly regulation, and income redistribution to address inequality.
Critics warn unchecked wealth concentration threatens democracy and economic fairness.
These are direct results of the government’s failure to govern. The whole purpose of government is to regulate.
Billionaire wealth should have immediately been taxed at the highest historical levels. Now we’re past the tipping point and have to simply endure living in an empire as it crumbles around us, while masses of rubes cheer their oppressors.
Thank Reagan for that
Jesus Christ, I’m getting hungry! When do we eat?
Simply famished
Resources to be extracted for the public good.
this should be illegal
One billion should have been illegal.
Agreed
and yet, no one will stop using their services.
They have so much money, the services aren’t even where they make most of it anymore. Trading and investing are.
Even if every single person stopped using them. They would still be billionaires, and still be making money by other means.
Interesting you think if everyone stopped using Amazon it wouldn’t effect him. What’s your twitter handle?
only way I see an option to not is to live similar to Amish lifestyles in the US, but even then, I assume AWS, Meta and Alphabet can make some money off their existence through satellites and IP cameras
I don’t disagree with you and not arguing not to be aware of individual actions. it just seems the situation is more dire than just not giving them our money or data
Unfortunately I don’t have a viable alternative for some goods from Amazon without a good price increase because local sellers up the price on top of the import fees.
On the bright side, I don’t shop there often and it’s mostly limited to electronics.
Your local sellers are probably buying from Amazon and marking up, then.
Every developed nation should tax these motherfuckers’ entire assets at 99%. If they want to flee with all of their money to Honduras or Haiti or something, let them enjoy that paradise.
They couldn’t flee with everything, most of their assets are things we pay to use every day.
We lost more valuable stuff leaving them in charge: manufacturing capacity.
Capital flight is perfect, they can’t take the means of production with them. It’s an empty threat.
They’ve taken more away just being allowed to stay here. Let them flee, just means less time needed sharpening the guillotine blades when we’re fed up.
That assumes national borders mean anything to this class. They travel by private plane and go directly from the tarmac to the car. They don’t even need passports.
Ahh yes, report all civil disobedience.
What? What does this even do with civil disobedience?
Deny, defend, depose.
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I mean, the issue is getting all nations to agree to that and making any agreement binding because otherwise the nation that decides to tax them at 98% gets all of the tax revenue…
98% of… what? Billionaires don’t get a paycheck like working people. They’re already sitting on all that wealth! If they spend money, it’s buying something once like a football team or Twitter and waiting until the value goes up before selling it. Same thing with stocks. And those realized gains are taxed lower than payroll taxes. They even take out unneeded loans like Trump just to avoid paying taxes! There’s a reason people say the rich pay less taxes than us…
Of the wealth this hypothetical tax would apply to. If you want to criticize the original premise you’re replying to the wrong person.
I’d be fine with just taking them out of the entire system. Like I said, let them live in a place like Haiti if they want to be rich and keep them out of the rest of our lives. Let them build themselves a Dracula castle in Port-au-Prince.
They’re not going to go to Haiti though, they’re going to go to Monaco or Switzerland or Ireland or The Netherlands. That’s my point, for this to work all of the “developed” nations need to agree despite having a massive financial incentive not to.
Why would they have an incentive not to tax 99% of their wealth when that money would literally be going to them?
Because, as I said, if they instead tax 98% of their wealth then all the billionaires will move there and they’ll get 98% of a lot more while everyone else gets 99% of nothing. Until a country works out they could get 97% of all that wealth to themselves and so on and so forth until you get down to the sort of tax levels we actually see. It’s just basic game theory in the end.
Billionaires aren’t going to move to those other countries. The whole point of their lives is to flex their wealth where the other rich people are. If they did decide to leave the US for some reason then tax the shit out of any stock trades they make on the NYSE. Hike their corporate tax rate on any transaction with US citizens. Freeze their assets if they don’t pay what they owe. There are lots of ways to do this we’re just too chicken shit to go down that road.
That shit was unimaginable even before 2024.
Mentally unwell hoarders
They should get therapy rite?
I can’t remember where I heard this but apparently there are therapists for very rich people.
The therapist was on a podcast I think and discussing what they talk about.
Basically all rich people fear not having enough money. No matter how rich they get, they fear and obsess over not having enough money.
I thought it was interesting. These are people richer than God and they always want more.
If this is true, why then do they need to buy super ultra giant mega-yachts, private jets, mansions, islands, etc?
If you are worried about running out of money, you should be living a very meager and humble life. Is that what their therapist tells them, as part of their therapy?
I think they are more worried about running out of asshole.
A single million could really change someone’s life. Just one million.
With all of my expenses tallied up, for 15 years, I’m covered worry-free and all I’d need is at least $500k. That’s it. Another half of that, make it 30 years.
These rich people, having billions at their command, are set for like twenty lifetimes over.
Assuming you pull a salary for 60 years you could earn $100,000/yr for over 150 lifetimes with literally just one billion dollars.
These rich people, having billions at their command, are set for like twenty lifetimes over.
I get your point and hate to be overly pedantic but even a billionaire with “only” one billion dollars, using the most conservative investment strategy would literally have enough money for 200 people to earn $200,000/year forever.
Their children’s children’s children will be unimaginably wealthy. There is no need for any one person to have that much. We’re supposed to be in space ships exploring the galaxy, not lining up to work ourselves to death so some mentally unstable chode’s great-great-grandkids can go to an Ivy League school.
One million invested to the stock market pays you on average 70k a year in interests. Now imagine having a billion on the stock market.
Almost all the world could live anywhere from insanely comfortable to fairly comfortable with $70k/yr
They take that as “hoard more money yes yes”
BE Luigi.
See Luigi
Absolutely obscene.
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I just wanna say that Zimbabwe had trillionaires before it was cool.
Compounding interests. I don’t think that most people realise how powerful the effect of it is. Anyone can take advantage of it but there’s no getting around the fact that the more money you have the easier it gets to make even more which then makes it even easier and this just keeps accelerating.
The effect is kinda broken though.
The old idea is that investment enables the unwealthy to use capital to be productive, and the wealthy to take on their risk. This is… fine. It still happens, and that’s great.
But past a certain point, there’s basically no risk for the wealthy, as illustrated how boards make boneheaded, abusive decisions every day yet still compound their wealth, often handing “the bag” of their failure out to the public and getting away with millions and a new gig. Startups hope to get bought out by megacorps instead of actually being sustainably productive, and the megacorps don’t care because they’re still stupendously rich when their boneheaded buyout fails, and it squelches competition.
Near trillionaires should not get the benefits of compounding interest. Their incentives are horrendously misaligned and broken, and it’s basically cheating the system.
What’s more, no one should be opposed to this. Socialist, free market libertarian, far right/MAGA, any flavor of communist, neoliberal, whatever, logically all of humanity should agree mega billionaires are bad for everyone and should be taxed to shit. The only exceptions are crypto bros, con artists, fraudulent day traders, (why would lose the systems that enable their pump and dump schemes), and… billionaires.
Billionaire wealth surges to ‘unimaginable’ levels in 2024 as Oxfam predicts emergence of five trillionaires within a decade
It’s less impressive when you realize that much, if not most, of that wealth isn’t “real.” The vast majority of that wealth is in corporate stock, and the value of the stock is based on a lot of speculation. How much of that trillions of dollars in corporate stock will ever be converted to cash? Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being only a small portion, and well less than a trillion dollars.
Whether their wealth is real or not apparently doesn’t prevent them from buying themselves politicians, ruining the environment and keeping everybody’s wages stagnant.
I didn’t say all of their wealth is fake. Much of their wealth is very “real.”
I guess what I meant is the reverse: I have nothing against people getting rich - even grotesquely rich - but not at the expense of everyone else, and not if you do it by buying yourself legislators that do your bidding instead of that of the voting public.
The billionaire class of today is rich because the billionaires evade taxes and manipulate elections in their favor. They became billionaires by making everyone else’s life more difficult. That’s why I want to see their heads roll, not because they’re rich.
I have nothing against people getting rich - even grotesquely rich
Well, I have a problem with it, but that’s beside the point.
My intent wasn’t to take a moral position on wealth accumulation itself, or the accumulation of “real” wealth versus speculative wealth, only to point out that much of the incredible wealth of the people at the very top isn’t what I would consider to be fully “real.” That’s all.
I get your point, but it is impressive (or depressive, let’s call it}.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s imaginary numbers in stock or imaginary numbers in a bank account. Just as stock values change, so do liquid asset values, with inflation and macroeconomic effects.
Either way, the numbers represent the proportional value of current human society that has been captured by an individual. Billionaires have captured and withdrawn thousands, ten thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives’ worth of value just for themselves. Whether that value is held in stocks or cash is immaterial.
Yes, even if the numbers are at least partly fictitious (or even mostly), it is still true that a very large percentage of real wealth is owned and controlled by a relatively small number of people. The way we understand and measure value needs to change, because it is very skewed and not based in reality (our current system is apparently operating on the premise that we can create a seemingly infinite amount of value, but that’s not physically possible on a planet with finite resources), but the wealth that has “real” value is very unequally distributed and that needs to change, as well.
Well part of what they’re saying is that a dollar is only a dollar if it’s liquid.
And if, for example, Musk were to cash out all his stock positions, many of them would be worth vastly less by the time the transaction was done. Not only that, but without those positions, many other wealthy individuals would see their positions suffer and their wealth evaporate.
It is still an obscene amount of monopoly bucks though.
