Billionaires saw their wealth grow by 62% during the pandemic, while workers' wages grew by 10%

• A new Oxfam media brief finds that Americans billionaires' wealth grew by 62% during the pandemic.
• At the same time, wages for the average American worker rose by 10%.

It's not a secret that the last two years have shaken up the world economy.

From March 2020 to now, the pandemic has reshaped pretty much everything, from where and how people work to people's finances. But report after report has shown that the last two years have proven lucrative for the wealthiest Americans.

According to a new Oxfam media brief, American billionaires saw their wealth grow by 62% between March 2020 and March 2022, based on Forbes data. At the same time, workers' wages have risen 10%, from $28.79 in March 2020 to $31.73 in March 2022, according to average hourly earnings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This isn't a perfect comparison of gains between billionaires and the average American worker during the pandemic, because it's showing wealth gains of billionaires versus earnings gains of workers. According to data on household wealth from the Distributional Financial Accounts, overall wealth for the top 1% has increased from $30.73 trillion in the first quarter of 2020 to $45.86 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2021, an increase of 49.2%. At the same time, the bottom 50% has seen their wealth increase from $1.86 trillion to $3.73 trillion.

"We can reduce poverty in the US, and we can follow a straight path to do it: Tax the rich; invest in working families," the brief says.

According to an analysis of Forbes data from the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness, billionaires' gains were closer to 70% as of April 5, 2022. According to that analysis, Elon Musk's net worth increased $266 billion, or 1,080%, from March 18, 2020 to April 5, 2022.

Billionaires' taxes — and just how much of them they pay — have risen to the forefront over the past two years. A bombshell report from ProPublica, based on troves of leaked tax data, found that billionaires pay a shockingly small percentage of their newly-added wealth in income taxes; in some cases, billionaires paid no income tax at all.

Their methods for not paying were perfectly legal. Over the last few years, the wealthiest Americans have been paying a lower effective tax rate. Currently, assets are the ultra-wealthy's primary source of income, but are only taxed when they're sold off — what's called a capital gains tax. That's something that leading Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have said they hope to change.

In April 2020, the International Monetary Fund urged governments to think about instituting wealth taxes to raise revenue during the pandemic. In 2021, the IMF doubled down, saying that taxes on the wealthy and corporations could help economies rebound from pandemic fallout.

Meanwhile, as economic recovery booms along, inflation has started to rise, with the Consumer Price Index hitting a 41-year high year-over-year growth rate of 8.5%. That's strained the wallets of a workforce who have, in some cases, seen wage growth outpaced by rising prices.

"Working families wondering how they will get by in the face of shrinking wages and rising prices are actually paying their fair share of taxes — billionaires relaxing on their yachts and rocketing into space are not," Oxfam wrote in the brief.

While Biden has not thrown his support behind an outright wealth tax, he has released proposals that would target where billionaires get most of their income — their assets. Under his "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax," households worth $100 million or more would pay a 20% minimum in income tax, including their unrealized capital gains as income.

That taxable income would include the rising value of assets like stocks and real estate. The White House estimates that the tax would raise $360 billion over the next ten years.

However, centrist Democrats will likely torch any proposal to raise taxes. Senator Joe Manchin, a pivotal vote for the Democrats' razor-thin majority, has already swiped at Biden's plan.