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"Taxing those who have experienced windfall wealth gains to pay for Covid relief and recovery is a matter of equity and justice."<br/>
—Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies
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"It is unseemly that billionaires have experienced such gains as we mark a half a million lives lost and millions more who have lost their health, wealth and jobs," Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at IPS, said in a statement. "Taxing those who have experienced windfall wealth gains to pay for Covid relief and recovery is a matter of equity and justice."
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world—and SpaceX founder Elon Musk saw their wealth grow by $76.3 billion and $158 billion respectively between March 18, 2020 and February 19, 2021—bigger gains than any other U.S. billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, saw his net worth jump by $41 billion during that period.
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"Even as congressional Republicans try to nickel-and-dime suffering Americans by opposing President Biden's American Rescue Plan, including its $1,400 relief checks, American billionaires have reaped $1.3 trillion in pandemic profits," said ATF executive director Frank Clemente. "The need for the kind of fair-share tax program Biden ran and won on becomes clearer every day, as billionaire wealth balloons while working-family hopes deflate."
</p><div class="twitter-tweet twitter-tweet-rendered" style="display: flex; max-width: 550px; width: 100%; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="true" allowtransparency="true" class="" data-tweet-id="1364582878181527553" frameborder="0" id="twitter-widget-0" scrolling="no" src="https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1364582878181527553&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Fr%2Fentryeditor%2F2650743126%23publish&theme=light&widgetsVersion=889aa01%3A1612811843556&width=550px" style="position: static; visibility: visible; width: 551px; height: 801px; display: block; flex-grow: 1;" title="Twitter Tweet"></iframe></div><p>The U.S., which has the highest coronavirus death toll in the world, reached 500,000 lives lost to Covid-19 on Monday. "About one in 670 Americans has died of Covid-19, which has become a leading cause of death in the country, along with heart disease and cancer, and has driven down life expectancy more sharply than in decades," the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/22/world/covid-19-coronavirus" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">noted</a>.</p><p>While <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-cases-decline-across-u-s-experts-urge-caution-n1257942" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">declining</a> cases and an <a href="https://prospect.org/first100/biden-vaccine-rollout-is-working/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">improving</a> vaccine rollout have prompted some optimism, the grim milestone and still-rising death toll served as urgent reminders of how much work remains to be done to bring the catastrophic pandemic under control.</p><p>"We are still at about 100,000 cases a day. We are still at around 1,500 to 3,500 deaths per day. The cases are more than two-and-a-half-fold times what we saw over the summer," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-cases-decline-across-u-s-experts-urge-caution-n1257942" target="_blank">told</a> <em>NBC</em> earlier this month. "It's encouraging to see these trends coming down, but they're coming down from an extraordinarily high place."</p> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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