The world’s richest one percent increased their fortunes by a total of $42 trillion over the past decade, a new report from Oxfam has revealed ahead of a G20 summit in Brazil where taxing the super-rich tops the agenda.
Despite this windfall, taxes on the rich had plummeted to ‘historic lows’, the NGO added, warning of ‘obscene levels’ of inequality with the rest of the world ‘left to scrap for crumbs’.
Brazil has made international cooperation on taxing the super-rich a priority of its presidency of the G20, a group of countries representing 80 percent of the world’s GDP.
At this week’s summit in Rio de Janeiro, the group’s finance ministers are expected to make progress on ways to raise levies on the ultra-wealthy and prevent billionaires from dodging tax systems.
The initiative involves determining ways to tax billionaires and other high-income earners, and is set to be fiercely debated at the summit on Thursday and Friday.
Tesla boss Elon Musk – or another tech tycoon – could become a trillionaire within the decade, Oxfam has previously warned
France, Spain, South Africa, Colombia and the African Union in favour, but the United States firmly against.
Oxfam dubbed it a ‘real litmus test for G20 governments’, urging them to implement an annual net wealth tax of at least eight percent on the ‘extreme wealth’ of the super-rich.
‘Momentum to increase taxes on the super-rich is undeniable,’ said Oxfam International’s head of inequality policy, Max Lawson.
‘Do they have the political will to strike a global standard that puts the needs of the many before the greed of an elite few?’
Oxfam said that the $42 trillion figure was nearly 36 times more than the wealth accumulated by the poorer half of the world’s population.
Despite this, billionaires ‘have been paying a tax rate equivalent to less than 0.5 percent of their wealth’ across the globe, the NGO said.
Nearly four out of five of the world’s billionaires call a G20 nation home, Oxfam noted.
It comes after another report earlier this year stated that the world could soon have its first trillionaire within a decade as the gap between the uber-rich and the rest becomes ‘supercharged’.
World leaders, including Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, attend a task force meeting of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 24
Tesla boss Musk leads the pack among the mega rich but the aid charity said a contender could yet come from nowhere to be the first to amass a fortune of a thousand billion dollars.
Lisa Rutherford, from Oxfam, told DailyMail.com: ‘The important thing is not who would become the first trillionaire but rather that it’s even an actual possibility, a trillion dollars is an unimaginable amount of money, and it’s absolutely nothing to celebrate.
‘As of 2022, hundreds of millions of people around the world – including one in 10 people in the US – were living in poverty, so the fact that any one person – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or otherwise – could become a trillionaire while millions of people suffer is simply unacceptable.’