We have enough resources and wealth that even with seven billion of us on Earth, every child should be able to get an education and none should have to go to school hungry.

But, the gap between the richest and the poorest beggars belief whether it’s in India, China, the United States or Metro Vancouver.

Oxfam’s shocking report released earlier this week notes that the world’s 80 richest billionaires own the equivalent of what the poorest 3.5 billion people possess.

A year ago, it took 85 billionaires to equal the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population. In 2010, it took 388 billionaires.

Seven out of 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years. Canadians are among them.

Although Canada was not included in Oxfam’s report, Working for the Few, The World Top Incomes Database shows the gap between rich and poor has ebbed and flowed over the last 90 years.

Here, wealth concentration peaked near the end of the Great Depression in 1938. Then, the richest few Canadians owned 18.4 per cent of everything. But that was chopped nearly in half during the period of unprecedented growth in the postwar period.

Since the 1980s, wealth has once again started to become more concentrated among the top one per cent, going from slightly under eight per cent of the country’s total worth to 12.2 per cent in 2010 (the last year for which data is available).

But while the rich were getting richer, middle-class Canadians and especially British Columbians were getting poorer.

B.C.’s median income fell 2.4 per cent between 2006 and 2012, according to Statistics Canada data. People in Abbotsford were hit the hardest (down 5.1 per cent), followed by Victoria (down 4.8 per cent) and Metro Vancouver (down three per cent).

Yet, even at its worst, the wealth gap in Canada has never been as wide as what the United States has now.

There, as the Oxfam report says, “400 of the richest Americans have more wealth than the 150 million citizens who comprise the poorest half of the population.”

And, after the 2008 recession, it was the top one per cent who got almost all of the benefits of the growth stimulated by government subsidies, while the bottom 90 per cent grew poorer.

It’s not likely to change any time soon. Earlier this week, the Republican majority in Congress made it clear that it will reject President Barack Obama’s proposal to narrow the gap by raising taxes and fees on the wealthiest individuals and the largest financial institutions to provide free tuition for two years of community college.

Obama’s plan is in line with what Oxfam recommends for bridging the gap.

It’s what worked in Latin American, the only region where economic inequality has been reduced in the past decade. There, using progressive taxation (income tax not consumption taxes), targeted spending on health and education, increased minimum wages and increased employment opportunities, 50 million people have climbed out of poverty and into the taxpaying middle class.