SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @04:04PM (1 child)
Really? Then why didn't the French Revolution and Napoleon's wars reset wealth? Or did they? Napoleon only lost an entire army of 440,000 on that disastrous assault on Russia. Wasn't that total enough?
What I'm thinking is that the authoritarian personality is a huge inequality enabler. Those are the sort of people who want someone mighty that they can follow. They'll bust their butts creating wealth for The Man, and won't hardly make a peep when he takes the lion's share, long as they get enough crumbs to get by. They're also the ones most easily inspired to take up arms, most easily persuaded to get in a fight. Wars get a lot of those sorts of people killed off. There's no shortage of greedy wannabe elites either. They're constantly rigging the game to give themselves unfair advantage. Then they display a very convenient amnesia that helps them conclude that they're superior people, and that they merited their successes. If the poor are too stupid to stop them from hogging up everything, well, that's the fault of the poor and they deserve to be poor, don't you know?
All in all, it's a bleak and grim outlook, to think that wars and disasters are some sort of necessary. Since the invention of the nuclear weapon, we can't afford to indulge in total war ever again. We need better answers than that. It is surely possible to keep life more fair without having to have a violent revolution to sweep away all the greedy elites.
(Score: 1) by Gault.Drakkor on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:39AM
There is a huge difference to WW1, WW2 vs Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The scale of the events.
WWs had many cities destroyed(e.g. Dresden), far larger areas directly involved in conflict. Much greater levels of destruction. Large amounts of equity was lost/ used. The intensity of the fighting in the WWs meant large amounts of capital was consumed over many years.
After doing some quick google searches in terms of capital expense it looks to me like WW1 cost 2 maybe 3 orders of magnitude more capital.
Who owns most of the capital? The wealthy. So inequity was decreased.