American Billionaires Have Made More Than $1 Trillion In 10 Months
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Billionaires in the US have made more than $1 trillion in 10 months, despite the increase in the country’s poverty rate.
Despite the US suffering its sharpest rise in poverty in more than 50 years due to the ongoing pandemic, the collective net worth of the country’s billionaires has grown.
According to new research by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), the net worth of America’s 660 billionaires was a whopping $4.1 trillion as of January 18. This is a 38.6% rise since March 2020.
On average, the fortune of the richest 15 billionaires increased by 58.7%. As per Forbes, Elon Musk’s wealth grew by more than 500% during 2020.
The pandemic has also seen a number of wealthy people move into billionaire status. At the start of 2020, the US was home to 614 billionaires, a number that has now increased to 660.
In a press release, the IPS and ATF said the increase in wealth among US billionaires during the past 10 months could ‘pay for all the relief for working families’ laid out in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, ‘while leaving the nation’s richest households no worse off than they were before’ the pandemic.
‘U.S. billionaires are delinking from the rest of the society, an extreme form of social distancing. Their fortunes soar while most Americans are facing unprecedented health and economic challenges,’ Chuck Collins, the director of the IPS Program on Inequality, told Forbes.
‘We are further eroding our social fabric – the sense of solidarity that binds us together,’ he said.
The US poverty rate saw its sharpest rise since the 1960s in 2020, according to a new report that was released earlier this week.
Economists Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan found a 2.4% rise during the last half of the year, as the US struggles to contain the coronavirus.
This rise is almost double the largest annual increase in poverty since the 1960s. As per Bloomberg, it means that an additional eight million people across the US are now considered poor.
Additionally, the poverty rate for Black Americans is estimated to have increased by 5.4%, the equivalent of an additional 2.4 million individuals now in poverty.
Biden is currently pushing ahead with plans for bigger stimulus checks. The administration is requesting another $1,400 per person for eligible recipients. This would be given in addition to the $600 payments that were approved by Congress back in December 2020.
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Topics: News, Billionaires, finance, Forbes, Now, Poverty, President Joe Biden
