Posted on 01/19/2020 6:27:27 PM PST by mdittmar
The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60% of the planet’s population, a new report from the charity group Oxfam says.
Oxfam’s report, ‘Time to Care’, was released Sunday just ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where about 1,500 of the world leaders in politics, business and finance come together each year.
“The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these,” Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar, who is in Davos to represent the Oxfam confederation this year said.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
All this stat shows is only a very few people have the knack for making big money.
India is the third world and is only getting wealthy it seems by the exporting of American desk jobs (phone staffing, graphic design, computer programming and testing, legal document generation...)
Or the ambition to make big money, and to take the risks necessary to achieve such wealth.
Why is it important to reduce the gap between rich and poor? After all, the gaps in intelligence, skill, and motivation between different people is very large, even in the same family.
Is Marketwatch advocating Marxist redistribution?
That isn’t good investment advice.
And they employ a massive number of people, and make it possible for those people to support their homes and families.
If the government took these billionaires money, it would result in the largest destruction of capital the world has ever seen, and set back humanity decades if not centuries.
Government would spend it in mere months, and then it would be gone.
The billionaires, their businesses, and their employees would cease paying income or business taxes.
Suppliers would go out of business. All the people they employed would be out of work.
Places where all these people bought food and supplies, bought home improvement merchandise, and other things, would go out of business.
The ripple effect would be staggering.
All so a few Leftists could game this situation, for political gain.
Those are pretty amazing numbers when you consider just 1 billion = 1,000 million...lol
The big promise Communism and Socialism always makes...
...and always winds up being a massive destructive force.
Equality... NONSENSE
MarketWatch - the Venn diagram of clickbait and class envy.
Gosh, it used to be special to become a billionaire. Now you have a couple thousand other people to contend with. Guess I’ll pick a different item for my bucket list.
Good for them.
I will be there some day.
“The ripple effect would be staggering”
There’s an understatement!
And how much are all of them worth 3 minutes after they die?
The same... Zero
Most American middle income people don’t seem to want to bolster their living standards by seizing other people’s money. Or by stressing themselves out and ruining their family life trying to get rich.
Unless my math is totally off, if each of those 4.6 billion people had only $1,170, their combined wealth would be equal to the combined wealth of the billionaires (assuming the billionaires have an average of $2.5 billion each). What that says, in my opinion, is that there is a lot of poverty in the world. I would also put forth that it is in those countries, like Venezuela, and other totalitarian government-run nations that have the biggest gap between the rich (the government) and the poor.
How many of those 2 billion have paying jobs because a billionaire knows how to, effectively, earn money for himself through the efforts of many, many paid employees?
Then, how many other people of that 2 billion prosper because those employees have money to spend on both necessities and goodies?
And so on and so on down through group after group...
They seem to have a lot of growth in the phone scam sector.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.