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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] OpenHammer6677@lemmy.world 67 points 1 day ago
[-] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago

The fact that we even have billionaires (and they should not be a thing. The notion of a trillionaire is even more fucking atrocious) is probably why donvict and elon are assuming power right now.

Without the broligarchs and their thumb heavily on media, both "legacy" and not, do you think there would be so very many stupid people willing to vote for the convicted felon?

[-] vaderaj@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago

Bro! But capitalism uplifted the most amount of people out of poverty than any other system right? Right?

[-] DrFistington@lemmy.world 32 points 1 day ago

Bullets don't care about your net worth

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Drones are extremely cheap.

[-] whotookkarl@lemmy.world 45 points 1 day ago

When money is used in society as security for basic rights like a home, food and clean water, healthcare, political representation in government, then people hoarding wealth at the detriment of others are responsible and shouldn't be surprised when those same people they oppress become violent.

[-] capital_sniff@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

This is why they are shoveling so much money into loyal robots.

[-] SpiceDealer@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

Shopping list for this year:

  1. AR-15

  2. Any 9mm pistol

  3. Semtex

  4. Military surplus gear

  5. Toyota Tacoma

[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 3 points 21 hours ago
[-] SpiceDealer@lemmy.world 1 points 15 minutes ago

Can I reverse engineer it?

[-] IceFoxX@lemm.ee 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

https://www.dailymotion.com/Xplosives_net Xplosives was a illegal german forum with Germans biggest explosives community. There is some well dangerous knowledge. Produce it yourself.
(Moreover, this is not an invitation to do so. On the contrary, I strongly advise against it. Above all, you should never look for the forum at archive.org (or alternatives). You may be able to find all the instructions there to synthesize everything you need from commercially available goods, including for other end products.)

[-] snekerpimp@lemmy.world 124 points 1 day ago

Mentally unwell hoarders

[-] AshMan85@lemmy.world 55 points 1 day ago
[-] blakenong@lemmings.world 52 points 1 day ago

One billion should have been illegal.

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[-] Naich@lemmings.world 85 points 1 day ago

Absolutely obscene.

[-] eran_morad@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

I mean, there is a way to cure billionaires and prevent trillionaires. Several cures, actually, some of which are likely more palatable than others.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 50 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Every developed nation should tax these motherfuckers' entire assets at 99%. If they want to flee with all of their money to Honduras or Haiti or something, let them enjoy that paradise.

[-] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

That assumes national borders mean anything to this class. They travel by private plane and go directly from the tarmac to the car. They don't even need passports.

[-] Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Well it matters for their companies.

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[-] gnutrino@programming.dev 10 points 1 day ago

I mean, the issue is getting all nations to agree to that and making any agreement binding because otherwise the nation that decides to tax them at 98% gets all of the tax revenue...

[-] Empricorn@feddit.nl 8 points 1 day ago

98% of... what? Billionaires don't get a paycheck like working people. They're already sitting on all that wealth! If they spend money, it's buying something once like a football team or Twitter and waiting until the value goes up before selling it. Same thing with stocks. And those realized gains are taxed lower than payroll taxes. They even take out unneeded loans like Trump just to avoid paying taxes! There's a reason people say the rich pay less taxes than us...

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

I'd be fine with just taking them out of the entire system. Like I said, let them live in a place like Haiti if they want to be rich and keep them out of the rest of our lives. Let them build themselves a Dracula castle in Port-au-Prince.

[-] gnutrino@programming.dev 9 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 53 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[-] P1nkman@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago

Jesus Christ, I'm getting hungry! When do we eat?

[-] eran_morad@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Time to call the plumber, I guess.

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[-] letsgo2themall@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

and yet, no one will stop using their services.

[-] brlemworld@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

Even if every single person stopped using them. They would still be billionaires, and still be making money by other means.

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[-] blackberry@midwest.social 16 points 1 day ago

only way I see an option to not is to live similar to Amish lifestyles in the US, but even then, I assume AWS, Meta and Alphabet can make some money off their existence through satellites and IP cameras

I don't disagree with you and not arguing not to be aware of individual actions. it just seems the situation is more dire than just not giving them our money or data

[-] Lemminary@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Unfortunately I don't have a viable alternative for some goods from Amazon without a good price increase because local sellers up the price on top of the import fees.

On the bright side, I don't shop there often and it's mostly limited to electronics.

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[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago
[-] lath@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago

I just wanna say that Zimbabwe had trillionaires before it was cool.

[-] crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

No shit, fuckin obviously. This is how money works. The point is not the number it is the proportion (though obv they're related)

[-] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Resources to be extracted for the public good.

[-] TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Billionaire wealth surges to 'unimaginable' levels in 2024 as Oxfam predicts emergence of five trillionaires within a decade

It's less impressive when you realize that much, if not most, of that wealth isn't "real." The vast majority of that wealth is in corporate stock, and the value of the stock is based on a lot of speculation. How much of that trillions of dollars in corporate stock will ever be converted to cash? Who knows, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being only a small portion, and well less than a trillion dollars.

[-] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 31 points 1 day ago

Whether their wealth is real or not apparently doesn't prevent them from buying themselves politicians, ruining the environment and keeping everybody's wages stagnant.

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[-] Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 8 points 1 day ago

Compounding interests. I don't think that most people realise how powerful the effect of it is. Anyone can take advantage of it but there's no getting around the fact that the more money you have the easier it gets to make even more which then makes it even easier and this just keeps accelerating.

[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The effect is kinda broken though.

The old idea is that investment enables the unwealthy to use capital to be productive, and the wealthy to take on their risk. This is… fine. It still happens, and that’s great.

But past a certain point, there's basically no risk for the wealthy, as illustrated how boards make boneheaded, abusive decisions every day yet still compound their wealth, often handing "the bag" of their failure out to the public and getting away with millions and a new gig. Startups hope to get bought out by megacorps instead of actually being sustainably productive, and the megacorps don’t care because they're still stupendously rich when their boneheaded buyout fails, and it squelches competition.

Near trillionaires should not get the benefits of compounding interest. Their incentives are horrendously misaligned and broken, and it’s basically cheating the system.

What's more, no one should be opposed to this. Socialist, free market libertarian, far right/MAGA, any flavor of communist, neoliberal, whatever, logically all of humanity should agree mega billionaires are bad for everyone and should be taxed to shit. The only exceptions are crypto bros, con artists, fraudulent day traders, (why would lose the systems that enable their pump and dump schemes), and… billionaires.

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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
714 points (100.0% liked)

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