Summary
Oxfam’s 2024 inequality report revealed a record $2 trillion increase in billionaire wealth, reaching $15 trillion, while global poverty rates remain stagnant.
The top 1% own 45% of all wealth, and 44% of people live on less than $6.85 daily.
Oxfam predicts five trillionaires within a decade, citing inheritance and cronyism as key wealth drivers. Elon Musk may become the first trillionaire by 2027.
Oxfam calls for tax reform, monopoly regulation, and income redistribution to address inequality.
Critics warn unchecked wealth concentration threatens democracy and economic fairness.
They’re not going to go to Haiti though, they’re going to go to Monaco or Switzerland or Ireland or The Netherlands. That’s my point, for this to work all of the “developed” nations need to agree despite having a massive financial incentive not to.
Why would they have an incentive not to tax 99% of their wealth when that money would literally be going to them?
Because, as I said, if they instead tax 98% of their wealth then all the billionaires will move there and they’ll get 98% of a lot more while everyone else gets 99% of nothing. Until a country works out they could get 97% of all that wealth to themselves and so on and so forth until you get down to the sort of tax levels we actually see. It’s just basic game theory in the end.
Billionaires aren’t going to move to those other countries. The whole point of their lives is to flex their wealth where the other rich people are. If they did decide to leave the US for some reason then tax the shit out of any stock trades they make on the NYSE. Hike their corporate tax rate on any transaction with US citizens. Freeze their assets if they don’t pay what they owe. There are lots of ways to do this we’re just too chicken shit to go down that road.
They don’t need to move there, they just need to base their business there.
As a smaller example that is happening today, Delaware is a corporate tax haven state in the US. Over 2 million business entities are registered in Delaware including more than half of all publicly traded American companies and almost 70% of Fortune 500 companies. If you go to Delaware you will see maybe 20% of those have an office location in the state.
Delaware will never change this because if they do, every corporation immediately pulls out of the state, sets up a new ghost office in Texas and then continues business as usual.
This is the same dynamic on a larger scale and is subject to the same problems. It requires cooperation from many entities who are not well aligned to cooperate with each other, and it also requires regulations with teeth, and the regulators are also not well aligned to cooperate because they share in the profit.
That is for state tax evasion. I’m talking about federal taxes. Make paying a federal tax a requirement to do business in the US. Enforce it per transaction, or as a percentage of revenue, or any number of other methods. It just needs to be a requirement to operate as a business entity in the US. We could easily do this if the will to enact it existed.