Global inequality, highest in decades — Sustainable Review
It will only get worse if we don’t do anything about it.
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Printing trillions of fiat dollars won’t solve global inequality. Raising taxes on corporations won’t solve global inequality. And covid lockdowns in Europe & the US are intensifying poverty in the most sensitive parts of the world.
Painting global inequality in 2020
During a global pandemic, billionaires saw their net worth increase by half a trillion dollars. This isn’t the first time billionaires have profited off a crisis… and it won’t be the last. Governments often bail out larger companies in a downturn. The wealthy takes those extra dollars to reinvest in a low-priced mutual fund or maybe a housing project while the rest of us scrap up the few overlooked opportunities that remain five years later.
Every boom-bust cycle, a few of us in the rat race build a cool idea. We may get a little lucky with a VC or well-connected customer for being smart or good-looking, or both. We get to join the yacht club. Middle America smiles, because she got an extra cookie this year. A new tech gadget just arrived on the market. It keeps Joey just a little more distracted from the absurdity of everyday life.
And while we trade cookies for good behavior, a continuous, subtle cloud of intrusion peers over the private life of the average Earthling. But we’ll leave the tech takeover for another year. Probably next year. This year, people are particularly starving.
Hunger, unemployment looms
According to the UN, the number of people facing acute food insecurity is expected to double to 270 million from 135 million in 2019. The World Bank projects extreme poverty to rise for the first time since the 1990s.
Meanwhile, there are still 20+ million unemployed in the US. As of late August, over 160,000 US business have closed. According to a Yelp report, 60% of those are expected to close permanently. Larger retailers, like Wal-Mart, Amazon and Costco, are putting out record sales numbers.
To buck that trend, US lawmakers took a fiscal approach. One remedy was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), an SBA loan…
