The 2009 Forbes 400: The Ultimate What-Me-Worry Gang

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from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



The 2009 Forbes 400:
The Ultimate
What-Me-Worry Gang

An average American family would have to work thousands of years to amass a billion-dollar fortune. America's super rich, the new data on our richest 400 make clear, can lose a billion and barely notice.

October 5, 2009
By Sam Pizzigati


Tsunamis, we learned this past week, amount to equal-opportunity destroyers. Against a surging 20-foot wave, an opulent beachfront manse offers no more security than a cottage. But a recession, even a Great Recession, doesn’t work that way.

In a recession, as Forbes documents in its just-published latest report on America's 400 richest, most super rich do see a dip in that financial abstraction known as “net worth.” But, otherwise, life goes on, as comfortably as ever. The rich emerge unscratched out of whatever wreckage a recession may bring.

By contrast, as economist John Irons reminded us last week in a powerful new report on America's lean-pocket majority, recessionary tsunamis can leave average working families permanently scarred.

Let’s put some faces on that contrast. Start with Steve Wynn, the gaming industry “king of Las Vegas.” Wynn, along with 314 other billionaires on the list of America’s 400 richest that Forbes released this past Wednesday, has certainly lost “net worth” over the past 12 months.

In fact, Wynn has lost quite a bit of net worth since the financial industry meltdown one year ago. His fortune totaled $3.4 billion then and adds up to just $2.3 billion now, a $900 million fade. That’s a tidy sum. A typical American family, according to new Census Bureau figures, would have to work nearly 18,000 years to make $900 million.

But Wynn, despite that rather sizeable loss, hasn’t had to crimp his style over the last 12 months. He “rang in the New Year” skimming the Caribbean on a 183-foot megayacht he bought last summer, then went on to spend lovely winter days dodging gossip columnists on the Riviera and in the Alps. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/oct05a.html