Shocking New Report: The 62 Richest Have More Wealth Than HALF THE WORLD!

Video Source: RT

The gap between rich and poor is widening according to the charity Oxfam, which reports that the 62 world’s richest people own the same as the poorest half of the planet’s population.

The Oxfam report is titled: AN ECONOMY FOR THE 1%: How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped.

“Instead of an economy that works for the prosperity of all, for future generations, and for the planet, we have instead created an economy for the one percent,” the report says.

“The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes,” Oxfam said. “The richest 1 percent have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together… Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.”

This gap “is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century,” they said.

Even worse, the report concluded that the poor are getting much poorer.

“The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent in the five years since 2010—that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542 billion), to $1.76 trillion,” Oxfam noted. “Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period—a drop of 41 percent. Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1 percent of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1 percent.”

Oxfam continued, “The average annual income of the poorest 10 percent of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.”

Wealth trickles up, not down, says Oxfam, because the richest individuals use global tax-avoidance schemes to avoid paying taxes to their governments. “Once [wealth is] there, an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of wealth managers ensure that it stays there, far from the reach of ordinary citizens and their governments.”

These disparities do more than keep the world’s poor living in harsh and primitive settings. Oxfam cited other studies that have found countries with the greatest economic disparities also see other social inequities reaching into higher social classes.