Here's What You Need to Remember: “Considering the total U.S. population is estimated to be about 328 million people, that would mean billionaires' pandemic profits could easily fund two more checks of $1,400 for every single American with a significant amount of money left to spare.”

The economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s become clear, have been very regressive. While those without much struggled mightily, the very rich got a lot richer.

Forbes reported last week that billionaires increased their wealth dramatically since the start of the pandemic.

“Total American billionaire wealth stands at $4.6 trillion as of the stock market close on April 28, by our count. That’s up 35% from $3.4 trillion when markets opened on January 1, 2020, just as Covid-19 was beginning to take the world by storm,” Forbes reported. “In other words, U.S. billionaires have gotten about $1.2 trillion richer during the pandemic.”

Among those billionaires, Forbes said, the biggest gainer was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who benefited largely from the dramatic growth in Tesla’s stock. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, due largely to Amazon’s own surging stock, has gained so much wealth that he’s become the first person in history to be worth more than $200 billion. Many others have gotten richer due to increases in the value of the companies in which they have a great deal of stock.

The billionaire class has done so well, in fact, that the amount those billionaires made could fund multiple new rounds of stimulus, according to a recent analysis by Newsweek.

“Considering the total U.S. population is estimated to be about 328 million people, that would mean billionaires' pandemic profits could easily fund two more checks of $1,400 for every single American with a significant amount of money left to spare,” Newsweek said. “In fact, if the $1.2 trillion were equally divided among all Americans, that would be enough for every single American to receive three payments of a little more than $1,200 or one single payment of just over $3,600.”

While that example may be illustrative of exactly how much money billionaires have raked in, it’s not so useful as a policy prescription; Congress is highly unlikely to simply confiscate the pandemic-era profits of every billionaire in the country and put that money towards continuing stimulus checks, or any other purpose for that matter. Furthermore, the stimulus packages that have passed last year and this year were funded by deficit spending, not by any corresponding tax increase.

Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders did propose, in 2020, to tax "the obscene wealth gains" of billionaires during the pandemic, although that proposal did not move forward in Congress.

The president has, however, proposed adjusting the highest marginal tax rate upward, in order to pay for spending in the American Families Plan, one of the next phases of Biden’s first-year legislative agenda.

“We need to make a once-in-a-generation investment in our families and our children,” Biden said last week in his address to Congress. “A once-in-a-generation investment in America itself.” 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver. This article first appeared earlier this year.

Image: Reuters.