The Class Divide in the US:
Stephan Schwartz: "Seventy percent of Americans are feeling financially stressed. One in seven American children has hunger issues. But for the oligarchs times have never been better; they are almost a third richer than they were three years ago.
Because of our grotesquely skewed tax system, the United States has become two very different countries. Not the Red Blue schism, although that is part of it, but wealth inequality so great that it has created a wealth aristocracy made up of the 5.3 million millionaires who represent the gentry, and 770 billionaires who have become a financial nobility. And then there is a shrinking middle class and several hundred million peasants. If that sounds medieval financially it is.
As the deadline for Americans to file federal income tax returns fast approaches, Oxfam America on Friday renewed calls for taxing the ultrarich while publishing an analysis showing America’s growing number of billionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly one-third since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and by nearly 90% over the past decade.
“Wealth inequality in the U.S. is more extreme and dangerous than income inequality; and we need to change our approach, so we effectively tax wealth as well as income,” the charity said in an introduction to the report, Tax Wealth, Tackle Inequality.
Based on Forbes data, the report found that “U.S. billionaires are almost a third richer (over a trillion dollars, in real terms) than they were at the onset of the pandemic in 2020,” while overall U.S. billionaire wealth has soared 86% since 2013.The number of U.S. billionaires—of which there are now more than 700—is also nearly 60% higher than it was a decade ..."
[Alter Net]
