It’s time to bill the billionaires
To help Oxfam engage Aussies on the issue of extreme wealth inequality, we created the Trillion Dollar Bill – a receipt listing over 8.4 billion items that the world’s 10 richest people can afford to buy, including the solutions to ending poverty.
The world’s 10 richest people have over $1 trillion between them.* Enough to end global poverty, with billions left over. But research shows that the human brain is unable to compute the value of that many zeros. We simply can’t comprehend what a trillion dollars actually means.
Ending poverty is surprisingly affordable.
We needed to prove that nothing is out of reach for the super-rich. So of course there are private islands, Bentleys and Post Malone’s diamond pinky ring. But that’s chump change. Look closely and you’ll find more exclusive luxuries, like SpaceX flights, the Burj Khalifa, or Twitter – which, incidentally, is more expensive than providing food security to 490 million hungry people.
Most importantly, Oxfam Australia has also highlighted special items on the receipt, such as global humanitarian aid and hunger relief, that will make it harder for billionaires to ignore these (really quite affordable) solutions to ending poverty.
