Absurd Inequality

BY SAM LUCERO

Recently Oxfam America launched a global campaign to address extreme inequality. As part of this campaign, Oxfam issued a report that highlights just how extreme global inequality has become.

Titled “Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Inequality”, the report offers some troubling statistics on the growing gap between rich and poor.

The Oxfam report notes that the richest 85 people in the world own as much as the poorest half of the world. That’s an 85-to-3,5 billion contrast. “Between March 2013 and March 2014, these 85 people grew $668 million richer each day,” reported Oxfam.

Oxfam offered an example of the absurd levels of wealth: “If Bill Gates were to cash in all of his wealth and spend $1 million every single day, it would take him 218 years to spend it all…In reality though, he would never run out of money” because he would continue to make $4,2 million in interest each day.

Oxfam reports that a “billionaire boom” has occurred since the world financial crisis, which began in 2007. Today there are 1645 billionaires in the world, more than double the number in 2007. This boom far exceeds the growth rate of millionaires, which rose from 10 million in 2009 to 13,7 million in 2013.

“Extreme wealth is not just a rich-country story,” said Oxfam, noting that Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu ousted Gates as the richest man in the world last July. There are 16 billionaires living in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 358 million living in extreme poverty.

In an effort to end extreme inequality, Oxfam is calling on governments, institutions and corporations to help build a fairer economic and political system. It proposes a nine-point plan including ways to make the world’s richest pay their share of taxes and close international tax loopholes that allow them to avoid fair taxation.

According to Oxfam, if the world’s billionaires were taxed 1,5% on their wealth directly after the financial crisis, “23 million lives across the world’s poorest 49 countries” could have been saved by providing them with funds to invest in health care.

With such a growing disparity between the excessively rich and extremely poor, it is no wonder Pope Francis called for an end to “an economy of exclusion and inequality” in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”).

Oxfam and Pope Francis share a belief that the world’s financial leaders have a duty and a moral obligation to make ethics a part of their business plan.

“Ethics — a non-ideological ethics — would make it possible to bring about balance and a more humane social order,” Pope Francis said. “Money must serve, not rule! The pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.”

Read the Oxfam report at www.bit.ly/1ufun5D.

 This article first appeared in The Compass, newspaper of the diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin.