The rich really are
getting richer

For the last 24 years Forbes Magazine has published “The Forbes 400,” a list of the richest Americans. A comparison of the growth in their net worth over the last 20 years offers persuasive evidence of the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

According to a New York Times analysis, the total wealth of the Forbes 400 was $238 billion in 1985, when adjusted for inflation. The combined wealth of the 400 richest today is $1.13 trillion. Today there are 374 billionaires on the list compared with only 14 billionaires twenty years ago.

The study finds that the combined wealth of this year’s Forbes 400 is greater than the gross domestic product of Canada. It is also more than the combined GDP of Switzerland, Poland and Norway.

The wealth of the richest Americans grew by 475 percent from 1985 to the present. However, the median household income has not shown similar growth. It has stagnated at less than $44,000 for the last five years. In fact, the median household income was $38,510 in 1985 and grew by only $4,808 to $43,318 by 2003. This is a growth of only 11.2 percent in 18 years.

While the rich got richer, the working folks actually lost buying power. The Consumer Price Index rose from 106.9 in 1985 to 192.1 in 2005. In those 20 years prices rose by 79.7 percent while median household income rose by only 11.2 percent.

Conservatives seem to insist that the wealth differential is a national consequence of the education gap. However, a review of the number of those on the Forbes 400 list with no college education has remained essentially the same in the last 20 years. At any rate, if conservatives believe that inadequate education is responsible for constraints on personal income, then they should be willing to have the government fund universal quality education.

A great disparity in wealth could be ultimately destructive to American democracy. Policy makers should be attentive to the growing restiveness of the working poor and Americans in the dwindling middle class.

Hidden meanings

Sometimes prominent people can make remarks that are so unseemly that one must wonder how they could be guilty of such a faux pas. Hurricane Katrina has spawned a number of bizarre remarks.

Upon viewing the New Orleans evacuees in the Houston Astrodome, Barbara Bush, the mother of the president, remarked that the people were better off there since they were poor and had nothing in Louisiana. Shades of Marie Antoinette.

Just last month William Bennett, a former member of Reagan’s cabinet, remarked on his radio program that aborting black babies would reduce crime. He quickly added that to do so would be immoral. But one must wonder how such a strange idea could have occurred to him.

Those who charge that powerful whites in America support the genocide of blacks are usually dismissed as being paranoids. But there it was on the radio, a proposal for genocide.

It has been said many times — a natural disaster brings out the best and the worst in people.

Melvin B. Miller
Editor & Publisher
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