Posted on 01/20/2013 9:50:34 AM PST by TaxPayer2000
The world's 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 billion in 2012 enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over, Oxfam has revealed, adding that the global economic crisis is further enriching the super-rich.
The richest 1 percent has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years with the financial crisis accelerating rather than slowing the process, while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report said.
For example, the luxury goods market has seen double-digit growth every year since the crisis hit, the report stated. And while the world's 100 richest people earned $240 billion last year, people in "extreme poverty" lived on less than $1.25 a day.
Oxfam is a leading international philanthropy organization. Its new report, The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt us All, argues that the extreme concentration of wealth actually hinders the worlds ability to reduce poverty.
The report was published before the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, and calls on world leaders to end extreme wealth by 2025, and reverse the rapid increase in inequality seen in the majority of countries in the last 20 years.
Oxfam's report argues that extreme wealth is unethical, economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive.
The problem is a global one, Oxfam said: "In the UK inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10 percent now take home nearly 60 percent of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more [inequality] than at the end of apartheid."
In the US, the richest 1 percent's share of income has doubled since 1980 from 10 to 20 percent, according to the report. For the top 0.01 percent, their share of national income quadrupled, reaching levels never seen before.
We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many too often the reverse is true, Executive Director of Oxfam International Jeremy Hobbs said.
Hobbs explained that concentration of wealth in the hands of the top few minimizes economic activity, making it harder for others to participate: From tax havens to weak employment laws, the richest benefit from a global economic system which is rigged in their favor.
The report highlights that even politics has become controlled by the super-wealthy, which leads to policies benefitting the richest few and not the poor majority, even in democracies.
It is time our leaders reformed the system so that it works in the interests of the whole of humanity rather than a global elite, the report said.
The four-day World Economic Forum will be held in Davos starting next Wednesday. World financial leaders will gather for an annual meeting that will focus on reviving the global economy, the eurozone crisis and the conflicts in Syria and Mali.
Fiscal cannibalism should be no more tolerable than the big iron pot variety.
A quick Bing search says the world GDP was about $70 trillion last year. So $240 billion is only 0.3% of the wealth created last year. Is this so outrageous?
How many times would $69.76 trillion eliminate poverty?
Don’t forget that, even if you manage to distribute the food, you end up destroying domestic producers. No one wants to grow rice, for example, if rice can be had for “free.”
And, by the standards Oxfam (or the World Bank) uses to define “extreme poverty”, leaving aside the mentally ill homeless who can’t or won’t take either state benefits or charity at the levels offered, there is no extreme poverty in the U.S.
All I know as well as you do is it DIDN'T work!
There would be a run on 40oz Malt Liquor in the US
You probably couldn't find a decent nose bone in Africa
There would be an explosion of babies in South America that would make today's poverty look like Happy Days Are Here Again....
...and in the end they would come back expecting more.
240 billion (4 times over), so divide by 4...
so they are really saying that only 60 billion is needed to end global poverty. Only 25% of what they earned....
You can't take from the savers and investors and give it to the masses..it will be gone, with the wind, in a day.
Really twisted thinking. How much money (our tax dollars) have we spent over the years on the “War on Poverty”? Check it out. The Dems, libs, whatever, want the majoity in poverty for their votes.
Who’s more to blame, the rich who earn the fiat money, the bankers who create the fiat money out of nothing, or hte politicians, who confiscate and spend more and drag us and future generations into massive debt?
“Tax the rich, Feed the poor,
til there are, Rich no more”
Repeat.......ooops !!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzrUqAtUcpU
The irony of this classic remains.
Shortsighted feel good polices that get votes and leave disaster in their wake.
The Gov’t is like a drug company that has a cure but no disease. The only way to use the cure is to create the disease.
240 billion only covers 80 days of barry’s overspending every day of 3 billion.
Bull crap. It's unethical to work hard for yourself and reap the rewards? It's inefficient to be productive and earn more than someone who is not productive? It's politically corrosive...perhaps, but only because politicians take the money and use it to their own benefit. Socially divisive? Really? Only if you believe that everyone should be paid the same regardless of effort. Obozo has made it divisive by saying that the rich should pay their fair share, yet fails to point out that the richest 10% foot 71% of the tax burden. Environmentally destructive? England almost denuded itself in the Middle Ages because trees were chopped down for heating. It's only because of an entrepreneurial spirit that alternative heating sources have been developed. Without the work of those "rich guys", we'd all be ice cubes by now.
Environmentally destructive? This piece of research and the paper used to write it, represents an unnecessary denuding of the nation's forest. It's pure political crap.
The rich just set up businesses selling beer to the "needy" and it all comes right back. :)
no, no....obamaphones end poverty. flat screens tell you you’ve won the lottery.
Bookmark.
When will people stop drooling over what others earn and get out and earn some for themselves. Wealth envy is a serious sickness that weakens the individual as well as the country. Envy works to the advantage of the Progressives. It creates the demon to be despised then overthrown with the result that all are miserable in their equality except the leaders, who will live in style and comfort.
ASK THE RUSSKIES HOW THEIR REVOLUTION WORKED OUT FOR 90% OF THEM! Of course 25,000,000 cannot answer, they are dead and buried.
Actually, yes. It is a grotesque underestimation, intentionally offered to make it so that more low-information voter will agree with taking more from the evil rich. Once they agree with the premise, THEN they can inform us about the "slight underestimation" and quadruple (or more) what they confiscate from those who contribute more to the economy than the government does.
Wealth invested in the means of production is not the same thing as wealth pissed-away on bling and Air Jordans and Escalades.
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