Today, Oxfam released a comprehensive report, “Survival of the Richest,” outlining the state of wealth inequality globally and proposed potential solutions to this problem, namely, taxing the rich. This report comes on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s retreat in Davos, Switzerland, where the ultra-wealthy and world leaders meet to discuss how to best solve the world’s problems.
Some stunning figures from the report include:
Since 2020, 63 percent of all new wealth has gone to the top 1 percent, leaving only 37 percent for the rest of the world combined.
Billionaire wealth has increased by $2.7 billion per day, while over 1.7 billion people live in countries where their wages, adjusted for inflation, have declined.
Three-quarters of the world’s governments are planning on making $7.8 trillion in cuts to public sector funding, like healthcare and education, over the next five years. This comes as marginal tax rates on the highest incomes fall, from 38% to 31% in Africa over the last 25 years, and from 51% to 27% in Latin America since the 1980s.
Only 4 percent of tax revenue worldwide comes from taxing wealth, while 44% comes from regressive consumption taxes.
In response, Morris Pearl, the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., released the following statement:
— source patrioticmillionaires.org | Jan 16, 2023
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