Billionaires got richer in two years of pandemic than in a decade, Oxfam says


The great fortunes do not know the crisis. While thousands of people have lost their jobs due to the pandemic and successive confinements, billionaires have become richer in the past nineteen months than in a decade.

This observation is raised by Oxfam in its new report on inequalities. According to the NGO, a new person becomes a billionaire every twenty-six hours, while 160 million others have fallen into poverty since March 2020. “Women, racialized people and people in developing countries are the most impacted,” says Oxfam.

France is no exception to the rule. In almost two years, the 43 billionaires of France have earned an additional 236 billion euros … against 231 billion euros between 2009 and 2019. With such a sum, it would be possible to quadruple the hospital budget. public.

The big winners of the crisis are the first five fortunes of France: Bernard Arnault (LVMH), Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt (L’Oréal), François Pinault (Kering) and the brothers Alain and Gérard Wertheimer (Chanel). Between them, they now own as much as the poorest 40% of French people.

A “quinquennium of inequalities”

If the health crisis has widened inequalities, for Oxfam, Emmanuel Macron’s policy has not helped. Reduction of APL (housing assistance), reform of unemployment insurance, abolition of the ISF (solidarity tax on wealth)… Since 2017, the 1% of the richest have seen their standard of living increase by 2 8%, while the 5% of the poorest households have lost up to 0.5% of their purchasing power, notes the Institute of Public Policies (IPP).

“It is time to turn the page of the five-year period of inequality,” demands Quentin Parrinello, spokesperson for Oxfam France. “As the government seeks to make workers and the unemployed pay the price for the crisis, there is now an urgent need to put those billionaires who have profited from public money to work”.

The NGO published in December 2021 a range of fifteen measures that would reduce inequalities and build a fairer tax system. Among them, the creation of a climate ISF aimed at taxing the most polluting people, the establishment of a tax for multinationals, and the individualization of income tax.



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