Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Recent weeks have brought three more eye-popping glimpses of our world’s unconscionable concentration of income and wealth . . .
The fabled luxury automaker Lamborghini, for the first time ever, has sold over 10,000 vehicles in a single year. Lamborghini’s current 2024 Revuelto model starts at $608,358 . . .
Google co-founder Larry Page has just expanded his collection of private islands to five. His latest, a isle that sits between Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, sethim back $32 million . . .
The Austrian design firm Motion Code: Blue has released renderings of a new submersible superyacht that can stay underwater for up to four weeks at a time. The 541-foot-long Migaloo M5 also features a built-in swimming pool, a helipad, and a $2-billion price-tag . . .
Why are Austrian designers devoting their talents to fashioning $2-billion baubles for billionaires? Just one reason: Today’s super rich are sitting on mountains of spendable billions.
And what’s raising those mountains of cash? Researchers at Oxfam have a compelling answer to offer in a just-released new analysis.
“The share of national income going to the top 1 percent of earners in G20 countries has increased by 45 percent over the last four decades,” Oxfam notes. “During the same period, the top tax rates on their incomes has fallen by roughly a third.”
In 2022, Oxfam’s researchers add, the top 1 percent of earners in G20 countries pocketed $18 trillion in income.
Oxfam released all these stats on the eve of this week’s inaugural finance track meeting of G20 financial ministers and central bank chiefs. The “G20” actually includes 21 players, 19 of the world’s most powerful nations, plus the European Union and this year, for the first time, the African Union.
Brazil, the G20 chair for 2024, hosted this week’s meeting in São Paulo — and Brazil’s left-led government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vigorously seized this hosting opportunity. His administration’s ambitious goal? To shove the case for taxing the wealth of our world’s wealthiest onto the world’s political stage.
No nation in the world, Brazilian finance minister Fernando Haddad told the newspaper O Globo earlier this week, may now have more credibility on taxing the rich than Brazil. Just last year, Lula da Silva signed into law landmark legislation that subjects the offshore investments of Brazil’s rich to a 15 percent tax. And earlier this year, to prevent Brazil’s rich from avoiding that new levy, the Brazilian government moved to limit the cash the rich can stuff into their pension funds.
The time has come, finance minister Haddad noted in his welcoming address to this week’s São Paulo gathering, for a “new globalization” that addresses the twin threats of climate change and maldistributed wealth.