#wealthdistribution — Public Fediverse posts

Europe's Ultra-Rich Could Fund a Substantial Part of the EU's Budget

https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-ultra-rich-could-fund-a-substantial-part-of-the-eus-budget

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084515

#HackerNews #Eurosuperrich #EUbudget #wealthdistribution #financialpolicy

Garys Economics: Do bond markets control the government?

Episode webpage: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gary-stevenson1/episodes/Do-bond-markets-control-the-government-e3l9dfj

Media file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO3261711823.mp3

#billionairetax #wealthinequality #wealthdistribution

Ah, yes, because when your country gets richer, *everyone* magically becomes Jeff Bezos overnight. 🤦‍♂️ Perhaps redefining "rich" as "having more sunbaked rocks" wasn't the economic breakthrough they thought! ☀️💸
https://www.dnews.gr/eidhseis/news-in-english/596650/greece-is-richer-so-why-do-so-many-greeks-still-feel-poor #economicirony #wealthdistribution #economicmyths #socialcommentary #satire #HackerNews #ngated

Graph from Tony Johansson, Katalys. "Swedish economic growth was highest when wealth and income distribution was most even". Numbers show curves of growth and income equality between 1915 and 2015.

#inequality #wealthdistribution

"Billionaire wealth jumped by over 16 per cent in 2025, three times faster than the past five-year average, to $18.3 trillion – its highest level in history, according to a new Oxfam report today as the World Economic Forum opens in Davos.

Billionaire wealth has increased by 81 per cent since 2020. This comes as one in four people don’t regularly have enough to eat and nearly half the world’s population live in poverty.

The report Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power analyses how the super-rich are securing political power to shape the rules of our economies and societies for their own gain and to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of people around the world.

The surge in billionaire wealth coincides with the US Trump administration pursuing a pro-billionaire agenda. It has slashed taxes for the super-rich, undermined global efforts to tax large corporations, reversed attempts to address monopoly power and contributed to the growth of AI-related stocks that have provided a boon to super-rich investors world-wide.

His presidency has sent a clear warning sign to the rest of the world about the power of the ultra-rich. Rather than solely a US phenomenon Oxfam’s paper demonstrates that rising oligarchy is undermining societies worldwide. Oxfam’s report finds:

- The collective wealth of billionaires last year surged by $2.5 trillion, almost equivalent to the total wealth held by the bottom half of humanity – 4.1 billion people.
- The number of billionaires topped 3,000 last year for the first time, while the richest, Elon Musk, became the first ever to surpass half a trillion dollars.
- Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.
- The $2.5 trillion rise in billionaires’ wealth would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty 26 times over."

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-jumps-three-times-faster-2025-highest-peak-ever

#Inequality #Billionaires #WealthDistribution #Capitalism

What if we taxed what people spend, not what they earn?
#Business #Economy #Taxation #IncomeTax #TaxReform #ProgressiveTax #ConsumptionTax #Economics #Saving #FinancialSecurity #WealthDistribution #FiscalPolicy #EconomicGrowth #IncomeInequality #The14
https://the-14.com/what-if-we-taxed-what-people-spend-not-what-they-earn/

How do Europe's highest earners compare to the wealthy worldwide?

The income gap between the lowest and highest earners remains stark in Europe, despite policy measures to tackle such inequality.

According to the latest Eurobarometer survey, 81% of Europeans believe that income gaps are too wide and 78% believe that governments should take more action to reduce them.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20251222-how-do-europes-highest-earners-compare-to-the-wealthy-worldwide?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#Income #Salaries #Rich #IncomeDistribution #Wealth #WealthDistribution #Inequality #IncomeGapEurope

The real reason why so much money is spent on fossil fuels and weapons manufacturing:

"In discussions of the composition of wealth, a common distinction is made between non-financial assets and financial assets. Within the latter category the uncommon distinction is drawn between ‘capital ownership assets’ (referring to ownership in enterprises) and other financial assets. The reason is that capital ownership assets come with a degree of actual or potential economic power – in the sense of having the capacity to significantly influence enterprises’ policies. The article empirically applies this distinction to 24 OECD countries that report uniform data on this (in line with the OECD guidelines). For the OECD average of these countries around 2019, it is shown that whereas the top 10% of households owns 51% of the total net wealth and 68% of the total financial assets, the top 10% owns 85% of the total capital-ownership assets. For individual OECD countries, the last figure ranges from 63% (Greece) to 97% (Lithuania). The figure for the USA is near to the latter, at 94%."

https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/31/4/article-p90_3.xml

#Capitalism #WealthDistribution #Inequality

"And as a consequence, they set the rules by which the rest of us live…and where it suits them, they violate those rules if only to prove to us that they are different."

#Trump #EconomicElites #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/19

"CEOs get geometrically richer while the minimum wage does not rise. The percentage of our wealth controlled by a tiny fraction of people rises while that for which the rest of us must struggle shrinks. A handful of families and kleptocrats control more wealth than the majority of humans on this earth."

#Trump #EconomicElites #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/18

"The Epstein case is an example of the degree to which the very rich have been able to carve out roles that while occurring within our society are not of our society. They live above us, exploiting us as they require or desire to but not subject to our laws or moral codes. …

Inequality has exploded in our society."

~ David Rothkopf

#Trump #EconomicElites #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/17

https://davidrothkopf.substack.com/p/weve-got-the-epstein-story-all-wrong

"Many of the emails to and from Epstein are marked by a tone of haughty knowingness, a kind of worldly, smug cynicism I’ve encountered before in people who think that they are smarter than everyone else. Maybe in the haughty world of billionaires and private jets, it is considered provincial to think that adults should not have sex with children. Maybe to them, morality is for the little people."

#Trump #EconomicElites #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/15

"There is no evidence that these men participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s habitual sexual abuse of girl children. But their interactions with him suggest a kind of blithe tolerance of his presence in their midst, a seeming comfort in exchanging intimate – and sometimes lewd – exchanges with a man they must have known to have sexually exploited a child."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/14

"But the documents also reveal the stunning breadth of Epstein’s connections among the nation’s elite, including long after his initial 2008 sex crimes conviction, and the extent to which other men in positions of great power considered him a confidant or voice of reason."

~ Moira Donegan

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/13

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/17/jeffrey-epstein-emails-elites

"The Jeffrey Epstein story makes no sense unless you realize that he was deeply entrenched in the foreign policy elite, a fact that gave him much of the impunity he enjoyed for most of his life. Powerful people felt comfortable around Epstein because he was one of them."

~ Jeet Heer

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/12

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jeffrey-epstein-israel-foreign-policy-elite/

"Contrast [what Bunch says] to a prominently displayed New York Times feature story that puts a nostalgic gloss on Epstein’s world. Looking back on that world and the people who inhabited it, it carried the headline, Epstein Emails Reveal a Lost New York."

~ Margaret Sullivan

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein #food #prices #beef #coffee #tariffs #HealthInsurance #food #NewYorkTimes
/11

https://margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/two-opposing-media-takes-on-epsteins

"When this perfect storm strikes, an electoral bloodbath in the 2026 midterms is the best outcome Trump can hope for, on a list of dire possibilities."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein #food #prices #beef #coffee #tariffs #HealthInsurance #food
/10

"The timing couldn’t be better, or worse, for this midnight of the elites. The overblown stock market fueled by an AI hallucination is set to burst any moment, and new hiring is already grinding to a halt — just as the price of everything from steak to coffee goes through the roof and health insurance is doubling or tripling for millions of Americans."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein #food #prices #beef #coffee #tariffs
/9

(continued from /7)

"about the much deeper rot that’s already been laid bare about the entire decrepit class of men (because they’re almost all men) who rule the world with atrocious grammar amid a non-stop booty call.

I’m not a financial expert, but if I had disposable cash I’d avoid the hyperinflated AI bubble and invest in a company that manufactures pitchforks."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/8

And as Will Bunch reminds us, the Epstein cover-up is part and parcel of this story of the overweening power and arrogant immunity of the grossly rich:

"I don’t know if the emails, so far, are enough to take down Trump, but the president should be even more worried — and he probably is —" (continued in /8)

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/7

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/epstein-emails-trump-summers-elites-20251116.html

"It would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly tragic. The dopey-ist son of a fake billionaire (pre-crypto scams) turned fake president, who likes Gatsby parties and golden toilets, go on oligarch-tv to lecture the struggling masses about how easy it is to move half a billion dollars. While sipping Merlot."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/6

"And now, we’ve arrived at the logical conclusion of all this—Eric Trump, the barking embodiment of dumb-son nepotism. A laughable lout with inherited intellectual necrosis and the empathy of a Terminator wrapped in designer smugness."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/5

Pointing to Eric Trump as the "patron saint of the stupid rich," Cliff Schechter says,

"Hello Second Gilded Age.

An era where a reality-show President with the wit of a drunken walrus would actually fight in court to starve Americans. Yes, Trump argued in court that food our laws required him to give people—so they don’t die—should be denied. So they do."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/4

https://www.blueamp.co/p/end-stage-democracy-has-a-mascot

"First, ignore billionaires when they threaten to take their marbles and go home. The big money always responds to threats of tax hikes, or even mere verbal criticism, by threatening to go all Ayn Rand and move to Galt’s Gulch. In reality, they won’t even move to Florida."

#EconomicElites #Mamdani #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/3

"Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion."

~ Heather Cox Richardson

#EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/1

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-16-2025-190

If the total amount of money held by Americans was distributed evenly, how much would you get?

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/economic-equality-ex

🍪💻 Apparently, the secret to unlocking #economic #prosperity with #AI involves... enabling #JavaScript and #cookies. 🥳 Who knew that the future of wealth distribution was hiding in your browser settings? 🙄
https://openai.com/index/expanding-economic-opportunity-with-ai/ #WealthDistribution #HackerNews #ngated