Who has all the money?

[Ohiogal]

The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day.

That’s how quickly the fortune of the Waltons, the clan behind Walmart Inc., has been growing since last year’s Bloomberg ranking of the world’s richest families.

At that rate, their wealth would’ve expanded about $23,000 since you began reading this. A new Walmart associate in the U.S. would’ve made about 6 cents in that time, on the way to an $11 hourly minimum.

Even in this era of extreme wealth and brutal inequality, the contrast is jarring. The heirs of Sam Walton, Walmart’s notoriously frugal founder, are amassing wealth on a near-unprecedented scale — and they’re hardly alone.

The Walton fortune has swelled by $39 billion, to $191 billion, since topping the June 2018 ranking of the world’s richest families.

Other American dynasties are close behind in terms of the assets they’ve accrued. The Mars family, of candy fame, added $37 billion, bringing its fortune to $127 billion. The Kochs, the industrialists-cum-political-power-players, tacked on $26 billion, to $125 billion.

So it goes around the globe. America’s richest 0.1% today control more wealth than at any time since 1929, but their counterparts in Asia and Europe are gaining too. Worldwide, the 25 richest families now control almost $1.4 trillion in wealth, up 24% from last year.

To some critics, such figures are evidence that capitalism needs fixing. Inequality has become an explosive political issue, from Paris to Seattle to Hong Kong. But how to shrink the growing gap between the rich and the poor?

“If we don’t do something like this, what are we doing, just hoarding this wealth in a country that’s falling apart at the seams?” Liesel Pritzker Simmons, whose family ranks 17th on the Bloomberg list, said in June. “That’s not the America we want to live in.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/richest-families-in-the-world/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[TEB]

1. I hope one day

That they pay their fair share of taxes

[Ohiogal]

6. "Hoarding wealth in a country that's falling apart at the seams...."

Great quote, eh?

Isn't the US government subsidizing Walmart by providing food stamps and Medicaid for Walmart workers, too? And gosh darn Walmart isn't the only corporation receiving it. Infuriating!

[Me.]

2. And What Is The Point Of All That?

In a lifetime they couldn't spend even a fraction of that

[Calculating]

5. It becomes an ego thing to them

They're basically competing with the other billionaires of the world to see who can get a 'higher score' like it's a video game.

[virgogal]

3. Not me,that's for sure.

[Calculating]

4. The French knew how to handle these things way back when

Maybe we need to do it again today. Such a level of intense greed is just plain wrong on too many levels to count. They make more in a year than a person could spend in 10 lifetimes (hell, they make more in a DAY than someone could spend in 10 lives), while their workers barely scrape by. Seems evil to me.

[in2herbs]

7. I have a friend who is incredibly smart and inredibly rich and for him more money means more

influence and power and he has the communications knowledge to exercise it. His wife is more down to earth (but a Repug) and she told me he's so cheap he turns his underwear inside out to wear twice before laundering. It's sad to watch how someone so smart in one area is so ignorant in all other areas, for instance his health and excessive drinking.