The idea that the billionaire class are merely creating wealth rather than capturing it from others doesn’t match the reality, and sounds more like spin from the media outlets they control.
Go back to 1989 and look at the wealth held by the top 200 wealthiest families here in the UK, it was equivalent to 5% of the UK's GDP. Collectively, they could afford to buy 5% of all the goods and services produced in the country in a year.
Today the top 200 families hold the equivalent of about 25% of GDP in wealth. That percentage will keep growing.
The wealth of global billionaires has apparently increased by 40% in just 2 years.
Ordinary people like us will lose around 30-40% of our income to tax, and most of what is left is required to be spent just to survive day to day. If you’re lucky, a very small amount will be saved, or invested.
Billionaires grow their wealth in a system that is designed to protect it, meaning the percentage they pay in tax is far lower than the rest of us. They also can’t possibly spent it on living, even if they do buy themselves half billion dollar boats as toys. So the excess wealth gets used to buy up the things that other people need to use - they buy up companies, they buy up properties, not just residential but they buy the factories, the skyscrapers, the shopping centres, they buy up the natural resources. All the while as they buy up more and more of the world around them, more and more money inevitably flows in their direction.
As they use their wealth to accumulate more assets, the rest of the world is increasingly squeezed out. The rest of us own less and less. Classes of people who used to be able to afford a house now find they can only rent. People who would have owned some shares themselves find they can afford far fewer than before - their share of the wealth gets that much smaller.
People who thought they could live a middle class life wonder why they now struggle so much. Even the wealthy (by most people’s standards) are left wondering why private schooling feels out of reach, or why the skiing holiday has had to move from the French alps to Bulgaria!
It is like watching the gravitational pull of a black hole - the wealth of the billionaires is dragging more and more wealth upwards through society and relentlessly towards them. That is why it grows so much quicker than GDP - they are not just creating it, they are taking it.
It is going to happen at a faster and faster rate. I wonder at what point will the rest of us will decide that enough is enough, that society can’t function like this.