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World's Top 26 Billionaires Now Own as Much as the Poorest 3.8 Billion

posted by takyon on Tuesday January 22 2019, @10:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the self-made-trillionaire dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Global wealth inequality widened last year as billionaires increased their fortunes by $2.5 billion per day, anti-poverty campaigner Oxfam said in a new report.

While the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth dwindle by 11%, billionaires' riches increased by 12%. The mega-wealthy have also become a more concentrated bunch. Last year, the top 26 wealthiest people owned $1.4 trillion, or as much as the 3.8 billion poorest people. The year before, it was the top 43 people.

[...] To address many of these ills, Oxfam advocated raising taxes. It estimated that a 1% wealth tax would be enough to educate 262 million out of school children and to save 3.3 million lives. As of 2015 returns, Oxfam says that only four cents in every tax dollar collected globally came from tariffs on wealth, such as inheritance or property. The report also claims that the rich are hiding $7.6 trillion in offshore accounts

Previously: Only 1% of World's Population Grabbed 82% of all 2017 Wealth

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 28 2019, @05:10AM (7 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 28 2019, @05:10AM (#792892) Journal

    There a very good book you can buy from one of the world's favourite utlra-capitalist money hoovers (right up your street) called Confessions of a Sociopath [amazon.com] by M. E. Thomas. You'd thoroughly enjoy it.

    And it's completely irrelevant to this thread.

    In this country (the UK) there was absolutely terrible poverty in the days when the economic models and political policies you so enthusiastically cheer were in use. In the early 20th Century, working people still couldn;t afford shoes in some places. Try going to work in the winter without shoes. People died of hunger. People died in agony of untreated cancer. People didn't get proper emergency treatment after an accident.

    And now that those economic models and political policies aren't in use, the place is falling apart. Looks like your plan worked perfectly.

    There is another book you should read which will help you to understand why even the most healthy living people often need health care, ie medical treatment from a pharmacists, family doctor or in a hospital. It's called The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution [amazon.com] by Richard Dawkins. When you read it you will understand why no individual organism (in our case, human being) is physically perfect and subject to disease. So you can not possibly, with any sort of straight face, hand-wave away the fact that poor people will need some sort of treatment, no matter how much cucumber and carrot they eat.

    And even the most healthy living people often can pay for that health care. Gratuitous reference to Dawkins doesn't make your case.

    The way the "universal" health care works, and was designed is as follows. You will understand better if you read the Dawkins book referred to above. Let's ignore accidents requiring medical treatment for now and talk about other forms of illness. In the general population, some people will get sick more than others. Some very lucky people might never experience anything worse that the Common Cold. Others may develop asthma, kidney problems, diabetes, mental health problems. all sorts of things. You can work out an average rate for the whole population and given the state of medical science and technology you can work out how much it will cost to treat these diseases and to offer pain relief and so on.

    I'm reading here a lot of irrelevance to "universal" health care. One can do the same for private insurance, for example.

    In the first half of the 20th Century, after much poverty and two World Wars the people of the UK chose to implement a Welfare State to help the young, old and sick, so that children would have the best start in life (you can't choose your parents) and the elderly would live in some sort of comfort (food, heat, clothing, shelter) after they were too old to work and so that people who got sick were treated according to their need, not their financial means. Apart from anything else, that provided industry with a healthy and therefore productive workforce.

    And since, they've been in perpetual decline. What a coincidence.

    We pay tax and "National Insurance" out of our income (those over 18 and earning over a minimum threshold) which is used to fund things such as the welfare state. I am proud and please to be earning enough nowadays that I pay well over £1000 in tax out of my monthly salary and a very large proportion of it gets spent on the NHS and feeding the poor.

    I guess if we're going to squander wealth, I'd much rather it be your wealth than mine.

  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:02PM (6 children)

    by turgid (4318) on Tuesday January 29 2019, @08:02PM (#793707) Journal

    You don't even attempt to understand. Your reply is more telling than you think.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:48PM (5 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:48PM (#793832) Journal
      It's a cool story, bro, but there's nothing there to understand. It's a standard blame displacement game. Since the Second World War, there were a few decades for the UK when you got everything you asked for. That so happened to have the unintended consequences of the creation of a successful conservative movement in the 1980s. There's been a similar replay of those circumstances with the EU/Brexit mess.

      Bottom line is that you obsess over and over again with "health care" rather than a viable society to provide that health care or even good consequences to that health care. That indicates to me a severe myopia which probably filters your entire world view. That doesn't mean that I believe the Brexit movement is firing on all cylinders. But this didn't happen in a vacuum. There are real problems you are ignoring here.

      • (Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:47PM (4 children)

        by turgid (4318) on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:47PM (#794612) Journal

        How very patronising.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 01 2019, @04:00AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 01 2019, @04:00AM (#794865) Journal
          And yet, we can look at history, such as the evolution of the UK from a dying empire prior to the Second World War to the present day. There's a lot to be patronized about.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 01 2019, @04:28AM (2 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 01 2019, @04:28AM (#794870) Journal
          I might add here that I don't have a lot of patience for people who get what they want... and then blame deflect about it afterward. You have your sexy universal health care and you have the society that goes along with that. Well, turns out that there's more important things to have in a society than affordable health theater for the masses.