America’s billionaires have added a staggering $1.1 trillion to their collective wealth since the pandemic began. Their combined fortunes now sit at $4.1 trillion — $1.7 trillion more than the amount of wealth held by the bottom half of Americans.
Meanwhile, the country’s poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points in the latter half of 2020 — the largest increase in poverty since the 1960s. And to think that Senate Republicans are decrying a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill as too expensive.
Please. America’s billionaires alone could finance most of that bill, just with the increase in their wealth over the last 10 months. An emergency wealth tax that used their $1.1 trillion windfall to pay for the COVID survival plan would put these billionaires back to where they were 10 months ago (still very comfortable, to say the least) while helping the rest of America survive.
This is the sort of trickle-down economics that could actually work. What do you think?
