billionaires

Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have been vying for the world’s richest person ranking all year after the former’s wealth soared a staggering US$160 billion in 2020, putting him briefly in the top spot. Musk isn’t alone in seeing a significant increase in wealth during a year of pandemic, recession and death. Altogether, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth surge over $1.9 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes. Those are astronomical numbers, and it’s hard to get one’s head around them without some context. As anthropologists who study energy and consumer culture, we wanted to examine how all that wealth translated into consumption and the resulting carbon footprint. Walking in a billionaire’s shoes We found that billionaires have carbon footprints that can be thousands of...

Beverly Moran, Vanderbilt University The speed with which a tax on billionaires came and went as a means to pay for President Joe Biden’s economic agenda shows why it’s so hard to tax wealth in the U.S. Democrats unveiled their proposal on Oct. 27, 2021, and it was nixed that same day, replaced with a surcharge on millionaire incomes. The idea of taxing the richest Americans’ fortunes has been batted around for some time, and perhaps with good reason from a tax perspective. The total wealth of U.S. billionaires soared by US$1.8 trillion during the COVID-19 pandemic as of mid-August. And recent reporting has found that despite their massive riches, billionaires tend to pay very little in taxes. As an expert on tax policy, I have observed that there’s a big obstacle standing in the way o...

Tag: billionaires

What Gives Billionaires Like Musk And Abramovich Such A Massive Carbon Footprint

Biden Tried Taxing US Billionaires’ Wealth – Why It Will Never Work