Anti-poverty charity Oxfam released a new report Monday which revealed that over the previous two years, the richest 1% have accumulated nearly two-thirds of all new wealth created in the world.
The report detailed that since 2020, there has been $42 trillion in new wealth created, and 63% of that, or $26 trillion went directly into the pockets of the top 1% of the super rich. The remaining $16 trillion was divided up amongst the rest of the world.
The report, which was released on the first day of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, said, “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%.”
Over the past two years, billionaires have increased their fortunes by roughly $2.7 billion per day. This was on the heels of a decade spent accruing record wealth gains, as the total number of billionaires, and the wealth they were accruing doubled over the decade.
According to Oxfam’s research, in 2022 the wealth of billionaires soared, alongside the rapidly increasing food and energy profits. The report went on to note that 95 food and energy corporations saw their profits more than double in the previous year. Simultaneously, there are at least 1.7 billion workers who live in countries where they are seeing inflation outpace their wages. Additionally, the report noted, there are over 820 million people, one in ten people on the face of earth, who are suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International said, “While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams. Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires – a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest,” adding “taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today’s overlapping crises.”
She concluded, “It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn’t lift all ships – just the superyachts.”
