By Luke Darby
For many Americans, the fallout of the novel coronavirus pandemic gets bleaker by the day. More than twice as many people are unemployed in the U.S. right now than there were at the height of joblessness after the 2008 recession, with more than 26.5 million Americans filing for unemployment since the end of February. Across the country, landlords are still evicting tenants who can’t pay rent, even in cities that have temporarily halted evictions, and housing lawyers fear a coming “tsunami” of homelessness.
More pain is likely on the way as many industries bleed out. As many as 7.5 million businesses are in danger of closing, including one in every five restaurants in the country could shutter permanently because of the outbreak, and some federal officials worry that unemployment could go as high as 30 percent.
But the pandemic hasn’t been bad for everyone. This month, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank, released its annual “Billionaire Bonanza,” an assessment of the wealth and political power of the world’s billionaires. As a class, they’re doing astoundingly well right now. In the first four months of 2020, the net worths of 34 American billionaires have increased by at least tens of millions of dollars each.
America’s billionaires have been greasing the system in their favor well before the pandemic started, with a decades-long campaign to lower their taxes while giving less of the profits back to their employees. In 1990, according to IPS, the total combined wealth of U.S. billionaires was $240 billion. As of April 15, that number had swollen to $3.2 trillion—more than the GDP of the UK—with $300 billion of just in the first three months of 2020. Meanwhile, according to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1979 and 2018 worker productivity—how much value a worker produces in their job—increased by 70 percent, but hourly wages have only inched up by 11 percent. That difference has just been pocketed by employers, shareholders, and CEOs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And as the IPS explains, billionaires “do not rely on income from the work they do to generate additional wealth,” meaning their excess wealth, on its own, yields more returns on investment.