‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half

Posted by nnomadic@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 22 comments

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cudanny@reddit

It's kinda mad how much wealth we have as a society and how much of it serves so little of us. I'm not suggesting we should all be communists but human greed holding us back at this point surely.

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SurturOfMuspelheim@reddit

"I'm not saying we should fix the problem but man this problem sucks"

Liberalism.

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cudanny@reddit

I just think the solution isn't the complete opposite, there's ground in the middle surely

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Middle ground between what? Equality for all and liberation of the working class and... Death and destruction, wage slavery and owning nothing, dying because you can't afford healthcare and everything else that sucks about Capitalism?

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Turioturen@reddit

Equality for all and liberation of the working class

Is something that does not happen when communism is done, what happens is a massive political class that controls everything and normal people still do not get what they produce, it goes to the politicians.

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SurturOfMuspelheim@reddit

First of all, you're not even critiquing communism. You're mistaking it for socialism.

Now that that is out of the way, you're completely wrong, and every example shows this.

Nearly every good statistic has gone up in every country that has tried socialism. Those that have had issues have had those issues due to reasons like foreign invasion, infiltration and sanctions, Cuba being the biggest example of those hostilities having a massive effect.

This is just another one or those things people hear about socialism and have some random single out of context example as proof.

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YachtswithPyramids@reddit

So why aren't you suggesting it. Are you afraid of "opinions"

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Low_Patience2519@reddit

I'm a physicist. This obsecene wealth inequality is inevitable unless we change the way distribution possessions. Any system in which the assets that you have influence how many gains you'll make, even if it's in a probabilistic way (if you want to factor luck/skill or whatever) leads to absurd inequalities: formally, to log or log-normal distributions, which basically means you can have a person with 100,000,000 times more than the median, there is simply no scale. It's called multiplicative growth. So...if you don't redistribute means of production or apply drastic changes in taxation, I'm afraid it's impossible to end wealth inequality as it is.

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TheBeardPlays@reddit

So Marx was right after all. Interesting.

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Wyrmnax@reddit

Dont bring entropy in my fing economics....

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BendicantMias@reddit

Tbf the idea of breaking economics' rigidity by bringing in insights from other fields isn't new. The most well known is psychology and sociology, which birth behavioral economics. But there's also other instances of it, such as complex systems theory being used and thus birthing complexity economics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics

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just_anotjer_anon@reddit

Our economic game is built on conservative ideas. Every country is built on dynasties being allowed.

People don't become über wealthy in one generation, they've all inherited wealth and ballooned it. 100% inheritance tax on everything above a threshold like 300k€ would work wonders, company ownership being divided among employees of the company on death would certainly democratise companies and make them less greedy as a result

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mrgoobster@reddit

Even a much lower flat tax, were it properly enforced, would solve the problem gradually. Rich people tend to make terrible financial decisions, so if the system is not outrageously unfair (in their favor), they tend to become poor again in a generation or two.

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ElendX@reddit

Rich people, maybe, wealthy people have an accountant to handle this risk.

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mrgoobster@reddit

That's why I said, 'flat tax'. In the context of taxation, 'flat' means a single rate for all incomes, no loopholes or exceptions.

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Bashin-kun@reddit

per the article, tax needs to be fully enforceable first. no point making more taxes when the uber rich are gonna hide it away somewhere else anyways.

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keepthepace@reddit

I'm not suggesting we should all be communists but human greed holding us back at this point surely.

The contrary to it is called redistribution and the philosophy that pushes that forward is called socialism and that's a very reasonable stance to have.

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saracenraider@reddit

This is something that always confuses me - if we suddenly confiscated all of this wealth and distributed it amongst the poorest half, would it actually make much of a difference? Supply wouldn’t change, so the price of goods and services would simply go up. The current equilibrium of the economy seems to factor in that a huge amount of ‘wealth’ will just sit permanently unused in bank accounts or shares etc, and if that changed then everything else would change too and pricing would adjust accordingly.

Of course, I’m not for one second using this train of thought to advocate that it’s good so much wealth is locked up by the ultra wealthy, it’s just something I’ve never got my head around.

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falooda1@reddit

Well it's an extractionist capitalist economy. There's not enough supply because it's not profitable enough.

Many people earn wages that are less than the profit that companies want in order to do something

So that land stays as speculation instead of being used for agriculture at a less than ideal margin.

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BendicantMias@reddit

In November, the United Nations’ World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded.”

According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

Notably neither of those amounts are anywhere near the total being just squirelled away by the wealthy from taxation, they're much much less...

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frankgetsu@reddit

The numbers are genuinely staggering. 3% of global GDP just sitting there untaxed while people struggle to afford rent. The system isnt broken, its working exactly as designed for the people at the top. Redistributing overnight would cause chaos but closing loopholes and taxing unrealized gains on the ultrawealthy wouldnt crash the economy. Its just political will thats missing. Nobody with that much power wants to vote themselves out of it.

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BendicantMias@reddit

Oxfam estimates that perhaps $3.55tn is still shielded from tax – worth more than 3% of global GDP. Estimates from previous research suggest 80% of this wealth, or more than $2.84tn, is likely to be owned by the richest 0.1% of households.

That would mean this tiny group hold untaxed assets equivalent to the total wealth of the poorest half of the global population.

That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.

That’s more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world’s 44 poorest nations.

the December 2025 “World Inequality Report” found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.

While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world’s richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.

According to the Tax Justice Network’s Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world’s wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.

In November, the United Nations’ World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded.”

According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/02/global-super-rich-hidden-355trn-from-tax-officials-oxfam