“We reject the narrative that this country cannot afford to invest in a better world.”

An analysis released Monday to mark Tax Day in the United States shows that the country’s 735 billionaires have seen their collective wealth soar by 62% over the past two years while worker earnings have grown just 10%, modest gains eaten away by the rising costs of food, housing, and other necessities.

“We reject the narrative that this country cannot afford to invest in a better world.”

According to new calculations by Oxfam America, U.S. billionaires now own a combined $4.7 trillion in wealth, much of which goes completely untaxed. As ProPublica recently found in an examination of data from the Internal Revenue Service—an agency that disproportionately targets the poor—the 25 richest people in the U.S. paid a true tax rate of just 3.4% from 2014 to 2018.

“The billionaire wealth explosion in this country comes at a time of historic inflation hitting working families, compounded by the expiration of critical social safety nets put in place at the start of the pandemic to protect America’s most vulnerable,” said Gina Cummings, vice president of advocacy alliances and policy at Oxfam America.

“The impact on real people is devastating, leading countless families to slip into poverty,” Cummings added. “The ongoing failure of our nation’s leaders to implement a more equitable tax system is a stain on democracy.”

Oxfam’s new analysis estimates that a series of tax proposals that have been introduced in Congress but have yet to pass would bring in $252 billion in additional federal revenue each year. The version of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda that the House passed in November would cost just $175 billion per year over the next decade.

That legislation, which includes clean energy investments and an extension of the poverty-slashing child tax credit boost, is effectively dead in the Senate due to the opposition of every Republican as well as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Both Manchin and Sinema have pushed back on Democrats’ efforts to hike taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

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