Report · 2026 Wages Shrink, Wealth Compounds Untaxed — The Widening Gap

Two trends, the same story. First, the gap: an ITUC/Oxfam analysis of the 1,500 top-paying corporations across 33 countries found that between 2019 and 2025, real (inflation-adjusted) worker pay fell about 12% globally while real CEO pay rose 54%. The average top CEO took home $8.4 million in 2025 — it would take the average worker roughly 490 years to earn that. Billionaire wealth hit record highs, gaining about $4 trillion in twelve months, and nearly 1,000 identified billionaires collectively received some $79 billion in dividends in 2025 — about $2,500 per second, meaning the average billionaire earned more in dividends in under two hours than a typical worker earns in a year. Second, the mechanism — and here precision matters, because the popular version of this claim is wrong in a way critics exploit. On reported income, the richest Americans do pay a high statutory rate (ProPublica found the 25 richest paid about 15.8%, not less than a worker). The scandal is what isn't counted as income: ProPublica's "true tax rate" measured tax against wealth growth, and found those 25 paid just 3.4% as their fortunes rose $401 billion over 2014–2018. A White House study using the same logic put the wealthiest 400 families at about 8.2%, versus roughly 13.6% for an average family. The reason is legal, not criminal: unrealized gains on stock and property aren't taxed until sold, and through "buy, borrow, die" the ultra-rich borrow against appreciating assets to fund their lives tax-free rather than selling. Tier note: this is filed as report/analysis, not a ruling — the pay figures are from Oxfam/ITUC's published methodology, and the "true tax rate" is a constructed metric (tax measured against wealth growth, including gains the law doesn't define as income), so it's a way of seeing the system, not a finding that anyone broke the law. That's the point: the system taxes work harder than it taxes wealth, entirely within the rules.