The anti-poverty charity Oxfam reported that the world's 10 richest men had their wealth doubled, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, during the pandemic, a mindblowing rate equal to $15,000 per second. Nine of the planet’s 10 richest people are Americans.
According to Irit Tamir, the director of Oxfam's private sector development, the wealth gap is nothing new, but its new record heights are nothing economists have seen or imagined before. "The gap between the rich and the poor was increasing even before the pandemic started. But the pandemic supercharged this in a whole host of ways."
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Tamir argues that in terms of the wealth gap, "We are in an even more outrageous situation than we were last year or the year before." He added in an interview for CBS News that "Wealth is begetting wealth, and it becomes exponential.” The director of Oxfam’s private sector development said that he fears by next year, those numbers will only continue to increase and that gap will only widen. Moreover, in Oxfam's view, rising inequality poses risks to billions of people across the world, who aren't sharing in the same gains in wealth and may be cut off from equal access to health care, vaccines and economic opportunity.
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Meanwhile, Abigail Disney, a spokeswoman for higher taxes on the rich and better wages for workers, believes that inequality is widening after years of weakened support for unions and changes in regulations that were meant to protect ordinary Americans. Lawmakers have cut taxes on the richest earners since the 1980s with the idea they would use the extra income to create jobs and economic opportunity, yet research has found that hasn't happened—and the tax cuts only helped the rich.
Disney wrote in the report: "Society was riddled with cracks when we started this pandemic—cracks which have widened into fault lines. There is more than enough money to solve most of the world's problems. It's just being held in the hands of millionaires and billionaires who aren't paying their fair share."
