America's billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.
A
new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, America's ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days. This is despite the fact that the economy is
expected to contract by 40 percent this quarter. The report also noted that
between 1980 and 2020 the tax obligations of America's billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased by 79 percent. In the last 30 years, U.S. billionaire wealth soared by over 1100 percent
while median household wealth increased by barely five percent. In 1990, the total wealth held by America's billionaire class was $240 billion; today that number stands at $2.95 trillion. Thus, America's billionaires accrued more wealth in just the past three weeks than they made in total prior to 1980. As a result, just three people - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffet - own as much wealth as the bottom half of all U.S. households combined.
Comment: A number of similarly strange, seemingly random, and often rather fruitless, attacks in Europe have occurred recently, the stories below are from just this year:
- Botched 'Islamist attack': Car driven into Barcelona airport, two arrested
- Knife wielding man shot dead by police in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on the same day of a similar incident in France
- French police shoot man wielding knife & yelling 'Allahu Akbar'- follows similar incident 2 days earlier
And from November last year: Convenient London Bridge Terrorist Attack Occurs Two Weeks Before General Election: UPDATES