The wealth of the 10 richest men has greater than doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic.MANDEL NGAN/AFP through Getty Images; Nicholas Kamm/Getty Images; Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images
The 10 richest men have greater than doubled their wealth in the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxfam calculated.
Oxfam issued a new report on inequality wherein it advocated extra taxation for the wealthy.
“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic,” Oxfam’s government director, Gabriela Bucher, mentioned.
The wealth of the 10 richest men in the world has grown so much during the coronavirus pandemic that even a one-time 99% tax on their gains would have the ability to pay for the production of all the COVID-19 vaccines the world wants and extra, in line with the charity Oxfam.
“Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom,” Oxfam International’s government director, Gabriela Bucher, mentioned in a press launch saying a new report from the group, (*10*)
Highlighting the huge wealth disparity that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, Oxfam famous that the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men greater than doubled to $1.5 trillion from $700 billion from March 2020 to November 2021. That’s a charge of $15,000 a second or $1.3 billion a day, the charity mentioned.
Oxfam used the Forbes Billionaires List, topped by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, to calculate the figures.
“Vaccines were meant to end this pandemic, yet rich governments allowed pharma billionaires and monopolies to cut off the supply to billions of people. The result is that every kind of inequality imaginable risks rising,” Bucher mentioned.
According to Oxfam’s calculations, a one-time 99% windfall tax on the gains in fortunes of the 10 richest men would in a position be to pay for the manufacture of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines. There’d even be sufficient to fund different public-works initiatives, together with common healthcare and social safety.
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“All this, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic,” Oxfam famous in its report.
The charity urges governments to “claw back” gains made by billionaires.
“It has never been so important to start righting the violent wrongs of this obscene inequality by clawing back elites’ power and extreme wealth including through taxation — getting that money back into the real economy and to save lives,” Bucher mentioned.
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