Romney and the Forbes 400 - NYTimes.com
What was illuminating was not so much who was on the list but what they collectively told us about the state of the richest of the rich. Thirty years ago, when Forbes published its first Forbes 400, a net worth of $75 million would get you on the list. Today it takes $1.1 billion. In the last year alone, the cumulative net worth of the wealthiest 400 people, by Forbes’s calculation, rose by $200 billion. That compares with a 4 percent drop in median household income last year, according to the Census Bureau. One would be hard pressed to find a clearer example of how powerfully income inequality has taken root.
Bonus points to Rohit for uncovering loophole trusts that allow a generation to pass its wealth to the next generation tax-free.
See: NFL replacement referees. It's a microcosm for the sentiment felt around the country.
Right now if you're rich and you're not giving back (like Bill Gates) then most Americans are ganging up on you.
True. At least they can give back to their universities and you know, get a building with their name on it or something.
That would be a great way to give back.
Stanford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon, and Rockefeller each created their own universities.
(Rockefeller is University of Chicago.)
Perhaps it is time for Gates-Buffett University, Brin-Page University, Knight University, Lucas-Spielberg University, Trump Umiversity, and my personal favorite, Jobs University.
But no Richard Branson please. The world does not need Virgin University.
I'd attend Rifkin University or Motes University.
I think it would align incentives; education costs are soaring, fear is growing that America is going to be out-competed by BRIC nations in science and engineering, and poor/middle Americans are losing jobs and afraid they don't have the skills to compete nor the money to pay for it.
And the backlash is growing against the rich.
Brin/Page/Zuck/Powell-Jobs/Rifkin university would create a lot of good will and hopefully solve critical problems too.
Thiel University would be on a floating island...wait, he already has a university. We call it Thiel Fellows and their class AND their class sizes are 20.
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