American Billionaires Have Added More Than $1 Trillion In Wealth During Pandemic

Topline

While the global coronavirus pandemic has crippled significant segments of the economy, leading to the United States suffering the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years, the collective net worth of the country’s billionaires has grown by $1.1 trillion over the past ten months, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness.

Key Facts

Key Background:

The chasm between those at the very top of America’s economic ladder and those in the middle and at the bottom was immense before the damage inflicted by the pandemic on the U.S. economy. That divide has widened. According to a study released Monday by economists Bruce Meyer from the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame, America’s poverty rate increased by 2.4 percentage points over the final six months of 2020. That’s the largest increase since the 1960s and is nearly double the largest annual increase in poverty over the last 50 years. An additional 8 million people nationwide are now considered poor, with Black Americans (5.4-percentage-point increase) representing a disproportionate share of those thrust into poverty. More than 70 million individuals (or roughly 40% of the labor force) have filed unemployment claims in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic. 

Tangent:

According to an IPS and ATF press release, the gains made by America’s billionaires during the pandemic could “pay for all the relief for working families” 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 arrival of the coronavirus. 

Crucial Quote: 

“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,” said Chuck Collins, director of the IPS Program on Inequality, in an email to Forbes. “We are further eroding our social fabric—the sense of solidarity that binds us together.”

Big Number:

$2.4 trillion. That’s the total amount of wealth held by the 165 million Americans that make up the bottom half of the population, which is $1.7 trillion less than the wealth of the county’s 660 billionaires.

Further Reading:

Billionaire Wealth Up Almost 40%, 10 Months into Crisis (IPS) 

US suffers sharpest rise in poverty rate in more than 50 years (Chicago Tribune)

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