Profiting from pain: The urgency of taxing the rich amid a surge in billionaire wealth and a global cost-of-living crisis

According to Oxfam research, every 30 hours on average, a new billionaire was created during the covid-19 pandemic. On the other hand, in 2022, about one million people were expected to be pushed into extreme poverty every 33 hours.

The trillions of dollars that flowed from central banks into economies to keep them afloat during the pandemic eventually reached billionaires and other asset-owning classes. This huge wealth helped giants like Amazon and Google wield political influence, spending 7.5 million dollars just in the first quarter of 2021 to lobby U.S. politicians.

While the billionaire class amassed giant profits, the equivalent of around 125 million full-time jobs were lost in 2021 and 99 per cent of people across the world saw a fall in their incomes, the brief notes. It adds that women were 1.4 times more likely to drop out of the labour force than men in 2020, taking on three times more of unpaid care work.

The pandemic struck historically racialised and marginalised groups particularly hard, making them less likely to receive healthcare and more likely to die.

Despite the 11.66 billion vaccine doses administered worldwide (enough for every adult in the world to be fully vaccinated), only 13 per cent of people in low-income countries were able to get fully vaccinated.

With low-income groups forced to spend a huge chunk of their incomes on food, corporations that control food systems saw their profits soar. Walmart grew its wealth by half a million dollars per hour in 2020 and Cargill had a net income of 5 billion dollars in 2021, the biggest profit in company history.

The top five fossil fuel energy companies (BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and Chevron) minted a profit of 2,600 dollars every second in 2021, that is, around 82 billion dollars. This was while climate change exacerbated by continued fossil fuel burning led to droughts and famines in East Africa, pushing 28 million people towards severe hunger.

As many as 40 new pharmaceutical billionaires were created during the pandemic. The brief adds that pharmaceutical companies wield monopoly and refuse to release intellectual property rights on vaccines, making vaccines some of the most profitable pharma products in history.

The brief makes multiple mentions of tech giant Elon Musk. It states that his wealth has increased by 699 per cent since 2020, making him the wealthiest man on the planet. He could lose 99 per cent of his wealth and still be in the 0.0001 per cent of the world’s richest people.

The brief proposes three tax measures to counter this wealth inequality. It calls for a temporary 90 per cent tax on excess profits of corporations and emergency one-off wealth taxes to help address the cost-of-living crisis. The brief also recommends a permanent wealth tax on the richest classes, which could potentially deliver universal healthcare and social protection for 3.6 billion people in low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Focus and Factoids by Yazhini Sathiamoorthy.