Marty Levine
September 27, 2024
My inbox is regularly filled with news releases and stories of new research reports that touch upon the subjects that I often write about. A few that I recently scanned weave together to tell a larger story; this was a case where the whole seemed more than the sum of the parts.
Just days ago, timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, OXFAM published its annual report on wealth inequality across the globe, “MULTILATERALISM IN AN ERA OF GLOBAL OLIGARCHY: How Extreme Inequality Undermines International Cooperation.” It is another chapter in the continuing saga of how a small sliver of the world’s population keeps amassing a seemingly ever-growing share of our collective wealth.
The world’s richest 1% today own more wealth than 95% of humanity. The wealthiest top fraction of a percent, in particular, have gained an increasing share of wealth, and with it, outsized political power.
According to economist Gabriel Zucman, wealth has become increasingly concentrated since the 1980s, as billionaire fortunes have grown faster than the global economy as a whole. In 1987, the richest 0.0001% of households had a combined wealth equivalent to 3% of world GDP. The fortunes of these roughly 3,000 ultrawealthy households — collectively valued at $14 trillion — now stands at 13% of world GDP, an over four-fold increase. At the same time, much of the world remains mired in grinding poverty. As of 2023, around 46% of the world’s population — over three billion people — live under the global poverty line of $6.85 (2017 purchasing power parity) per day.
For those who have been readers of Change Counts over the years this will not be new or shocking. But it still jars me every time I see a new accounting.
OXFAM then laid out very clearly how wealth is power and how that power is used to protect itself.
The ultrawealthy spend substantial sums in their individual capacities to influence policymakers, often pushing for lower taxes or other policies that increase the value of their assets, including their outsized holdings of corporate equities. Moreover, the concentration of corporate ownership enables the ultrawealthy to augment their individual influence by exerting greater control over corporate lobbying and political activity. An Oxfam analysis of 182 of the largest US public corporations found that they spent a collective $746 million on lobbying in 2022, an average of $4.1 million per company. Studies have found that corporate lobbying can generate financial returns far greater than the amount spent. Oxfam found that, from 2008 to 2014, for every $1 the 50 largest US public companies spent on lobbying, they received $130 in tax breaks and more than $4,000 in federal loans, loan guarantees, and bailouts.
Just days later I opened a daily newsletter from the Chronicle of Philanthropy to find their analysis of how the mega-wealthy, those who are controlling that large share of global wealth, are using their fortunes to impact policy through both philanthropic and political gifts in a manner that is unavailable to the rest of us.
Ultra-wealthy donors, whose charitable gifts the Chronicle tracks, account for roughly 8.5 percent of the $6.3 billion that individuals and couples have (politically) contributed as of September 17, according to a Chronicle analysis of Federal Election Commission data compiled by Open Secrets, a campaign-finance watchdog.
Donors such as Ken Griffin, Paul Singer, Michael Bloomberg, and Reid Hoffman are collectively giving hundreds of millions to candidates and political-action committees called super PACs, which can receive unlimited amounts to advocate for or against candidates.
It’s an illustration of the disproportionate influence of billionaire and multimillionaire donors, whose views are often more hardline than the average partisan voter and small-dollar donor, in both the nonprofit and government realms.
As if this data did not speak for itself, the Chronicle’s story provided an experts’ view of what this means.
“Money is power, and philanthropy is just one way of being able to assert influence in society,” said Katherina Rosqueta, who leads the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy…
“Social welfare organizations, the nonprofits the IRS designates as 501(c)(4)s, are allowed to support political campaigns and causes as long as that work doesn’t comprise more than 49 percent of their activity. The use of these vehicles is on the rise post-Citizens United, said Issue One’s Michael Beckel….
“The kind of legacy that a lot of these donors are thinking about may have both charitable and political electoral aspects to it,” said Beckel. “They may want to translate their passion into charitable giving and advance the careers of politicians that they think will make better decisions about the issues that they care most deeply about.”
My concern is not about the issues and perspectives that these men and women are advocating for. Some I agree with and some I disagree with but in both cases, their influence is powered by the wealth that our nation’s policies have allowed them to hoard, and it is strengthened by our unwillingness to regulate how they use their funds.
I have often commented about how the ability to use this wealth magnifies personal choice about what is important to our nation and our world over collective interests and the good of all.
At the same time, we see the increased concentration of wealth and the growing use of that to influence policies that affect all of our lives. In another new study, that was published by The Commonwealth Fund the state of health care in the United States was examined. Its title, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System” and its conclusion, “The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector” tell the whole disturbing tale.
The researchers compared our country’s performance with nine other industrialized countries and found we ranked at the bottom.
They also found that we spent more than these other nations!
While healthcare spending is not a measure of performance in the Mirror, Mirror 2024 rankings, it provides important context for our analysis. The United States is not just an outlier on health system performance; it’s an outlier on health care spending as well. In 1980, U.S. expenditures were at the high end of the distribution among the 10 nations studied, but comparable to outlays in Sweden and Germany (8.2% of GDP). Since then, however, the U.S. has far outpaced other nations, spending more than 16 percent of its GDP on health care in 2022 (Exhibit 3). That figure is predicted to exceed 20 percent by 2035.2 In 1980, the other countries included in this analysis spent between 4 percent and 8 percent of GDP, and had increased spending to between 8 percent and 12 percent by 2023.
Healthcare is not an outlier. Our social safety net is frayed and leaves many to struggle.
This is a result of a system that prioritizes individual success and individual choice. It is a system that allows wealth to protect itself and for the wealthy to have control because of their wealth.
Not a new story for Change Counts, but it deserves re-telling. If things are to change, this story will need to be repeated until there is actual change… in the right direction. Wealth accumulation should not be the determining factor in our policies and actions.
