Not so random numbers, documenting runaway inequality

 From Forbes 36 Annual World’s Billionaire List. Over 1,000 global billionaires have become a lot wealthier over the past year; the 20 richest billionaires alone are now worth a combined $2 trillion, up from $1.8 trillion the year before. This means that the 20 richest billionaires average $100,000,000,000 each in net worth and saw their wealth increase $10,000,000,000 last year.

To put that in context, if a household making $50,000 a year saved every penny of that, building just a one-billion-dollar nest egg would take 20,000 years. Humans invented fire 20,000 years ago.

While I doubt that a family with an income of $50,000 would be able to save any pennies in today’s economy, you do have to pity the poor billionaires who have to pay $75,000 a night to stay in the penthouse suite in NYC’s Mark Hotel, not to mention the outrageous cost of a joy ride in space.

On the other end of the scale, the average poverty rate in the 363 counties where the COVID-19 death rate was highest, was 45%. The difference in medium income between those counties and the counties with lower death rates was $23,000. I’m willing to bet that the 363 counties with the highest death rates also had a much high percentage of families without medical insurance, but I can’t find any takers.

All of which points to the need for a tax on the wealth of the billionaire class. Since their wealth is increasing at 10% per year, an annual 5% wealth tax shouldn’t be too “taxing”.

And we could use that money to pay for Improved Medicare for All. I call that a win-win. 

Not all news is bad. From Inequality.org

Last Monday two very disparate groups gathered in Washington, D.C., both boldly focused on confronting the ravages of runaway inequality.

Reverend William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign came to D.C. to unveil landmark new research. A Poor People’s Pandemic Report, their new paper, tracks the intersections of poverty, race, and Covid-19 via an interactive county-level map — and shows clearly that poverty has not been “tangential to the pandemic, but deeply embedded in its geography.”

A few blocks away, at the Patriotic Millionaires Oligarchs vs. All of Us conference, experts, movement leaders, and proud class traitors gathered to examine the unjust systems created by and for America’s richest. Extreme concentrations of wealth don’t just protect immoral systems and policies, argued keynoter Abigail Disney. These giant fortunes degrade wealthy people themselves, fostering greed, selfishness, and isolation.