Focus on Arts and Ecology

Jon,

As billionaires, government leaders, and corporate executives jet in for the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a rice and flour seller in Uganda is struggling to make ends meet. The contrast couldn’t be greater: while that Ugandan market seller pays a 40% tax on her meager profits, billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have gotten away with paying a “true tax rate” of 3% or less.

Here’s the truth: As the cost of living skyrockets for billions of people at home and around the world, so do billionaire profits.

That’s no coincidence. Oxfam’s latest report, Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality, paints a stark picture of what that means for 99% of us just trying to get by. Our findings show the massive scale of income inequality — and how wealth hoarding by the super-rich continues to harm millions of families around the globe.

Here are some key findings from the report you absolutely don’t want to miss:

· Billionaires have capitalized on compounding crises. Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7 billion a day — even as 1.7 billion workers live in countries in which inflation is outpacing wages. That’s more than the population of India.

· Billionaires are driving the climate crisis. Our research found that the super-rich are key contributors to climate change, driving a million times more carbon than the average person.

· Billionaire greed perpetuates extreme poverty. The World Bank announced in 2022 that we will likely fail to meet the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 amid what’s likely to be the largest increase in global inequality since World War II.

· It doesn’t have to be this way. The top US federal income tax rate actually averaged 81% between 1944 and 1981, while the corporate tax rate hovered around 50% — dovetailing with soaring economic development in the United States. Oxfam calculated that a wealth tax between 2-5% on the world’s super-rich could lift 2 billion people out of poverty. Plus, it’s hugely popular, as a majority of people in the US support taxing the rich.

Jon, if you care deeply about ending inequality and extreme poverty, this is a report you don’t want to miss. Take our inequality quiz, read the report, and share with your friends and family to continue the conversation >>

In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be reaching out with more ways you can get involved to make billionaires pay their fair share and bring down costs of living for millions of people. As always, thanks for being a part of this incredibly important work.

Sincerely,