Billionaires and Beggars; The Inequality Chasm
If you earned £33K a year without spending a penny, it would take 30,000 years to accumulate a billion pounds.
If you were to spend £1K a day, everyday day, it would take 2,740 years to burn through a billion pounds.
Britain has an all time high of 151 billionaires.
Inequality is not a new concept. It has be present for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But this isn't the stone age, and while we've made strides in improving quality of life for many, inequality was and still is a stain on humanity.
In more recent times the gulf between the rich and the poor has been ever widening and now it's a chasm. Here is a small snapshot of that financial disparity.
While the UK's billionaires have doubled their wealth over the last ten years, the poorest 10% have seen their incomes cut by a fifth.
This stark contrast in wealth was revealed by research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in November 2019. During the same period of time Britain's number of resident millionaires has more than tripled from 750,000 to 2,500,000.
The top 1% have the same wealth as the bottom 80%.
All this in a rich country. A country that parades as a free market western democracy on the global stage. The ugly truth of the matter is that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.
Britain is a story of billionaires and beggars. While the rich pay cash for their third mega-yatch, hundreds if not thousands are dying on our streets, alone, starving and cold. Millions more struggling to eat, pay their rent, heat their homes with 14 million people languishing in poverty in the UK.
The richest six people in the UK - all men, with a combined wealth of £39.4 billion, have the same wealth as the bottom 13.2 million people. What could six people possibly want with nearly forty billion pounds while hundreds of thousands sleep rough?
Rising prices mean those who are asset rich (investments, shares, property portfolios) have gained the most in the last decade, meanwhile it has taken 11 years for the average weekly wage to return to it's pre-crash 2008 level of £473 per week.
This is in large part due to austerity for the poor and tax breaks for the rich. Ideologically driven policies that has seen the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rampant and ever growing inequality doesn't show any signs of slowing either.
#FoodBankFriday
As a food bank user I have a small request of those reading this blog.
If you're lucky enough to be able to do so, please consider donating to your local food bank.
Times are tough for many.
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