Billionaires getting richer, while poor get poorer

By David Walsh:

Forbes 2007 list: Nearly one thousand billionaires in the world, a misfortune for humanity

10 March 2007

Forbes magazine released its annual list of billionaires Thursday.

There are now nearly one thousand billionaires worldwide—946 to be exact, according to the magazine’s calculations—and their combined wealth in the past year grew by 35 percent to $3.5 trillion.

The latter figure is larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every nation in the world with the exception of the US, China, Japan and India.

The combined GDP of all the countries in Africa, a continent of nearly one billion people, was some $2.3 trillion in 2005.

More than a third of the African population lives on less than $1 a day.

The combined GDP of South America’s largest trading bloc, Mercosur, whose full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, is $1.1 trillion.

The proposed US federal budget for 2007 amounts to $2.8 trillion.

The sum devoted in that budget to Social Security, Medicare and education for a population of 300 million people is approximately one-third of the combined wealth of those 946 individuals.

See also here.

Forbes’ list of 400 richest US Americans: here.

Britain: the rich getting richer under Blair; and poor poorer.

See also here.

And here.

Germany: see here.

Blair’s anti poor ‘reforms’: here.

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