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The rich are getting richer,
so get out of their way!
of TheColumnists.com
Is Tiffany’s a publicly traded company? Is Gucci? Louis Vuitton? If they are, maybe we’d better think about getting some nickels and dimes together and buying stock. (Look under the sofa cushions.)
Why is that? Well, you have heard people refer to the Gay Nineties (they had nothing to do with homosexuality), the Roaring Twenties and Silicon Valley’s Go-Go Bubble in the last decade of the Twentieth Century, haven’t you?
They were legendary times when fortunes were made and lost, where entrepreneurs boldly staked out future financial empires and the rich were very, very rich. Andrew Carnegie; John D. Rockefeller; J. P. Morgan. A gilded age. The rich were really rich and the poor were really poor.
Make way, my friends, for the likewise legendary ought-oughts. The ‘00 years we’re living through right now at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. It’s a great time to be rich. It’s been getting better and better for the past 25 years. According to one analysis, the richest 20 percent of the American population accounts for 60 percent of all consumption. The share of total national income received by the top 1 percent of the population has doubled since 1980. The top one-tenth of that top 1 percent gets 7 percent of all income in the United States.
These days, we have ordinary rich people--some lawyers, some doctors, some stockbrokers, some businessmen--that sort of thing. And then we have the superrich. They buy paintings for upwards of $50 million, as Australian Alan Bond did for a Van Gogh at $54 million in 1987. (He was a pioneering superrich guy.) They don’t fly first class. Nor do they take to the skies in your ordinary piddling 727 airliner-size private jet. No, the superrich have their own 747s. Maybe with a basketball court aboard.
In California, there’s a company that specializes in building tree houses that cost a million bucks or more. That’s right--treehouses, for kids of all ages. Two-story tree houses? No problem. Just bring your checkbook.
There has been a boom in sales of yachts. Big ones--some of them are 400 feet long. Sales of those babies have gone up by 80 percent during the past six years. There is an increasing shortage of marina slips for private yachts.
So it seems evident that the demand for luxury goods is going up, up, up these days. We’re not talking of just $400 crocodile wallets here. We’re talking about enhancing the bottom line of cobblers who will slip your feet into a pair of shoes for $5,000. British tailors who are not only aware that your arms are not the same length, but who inquire which wrist you wear your $35,000 Swiss watch on, so they can adjust the sleeve length of your bespoke shirt to take that, too, into account.
Face it. The only way you and I are going to get a piece of the action is to put some money into all those companies that stand to profit from our era of the superrich. Stands to reason. More rich people, they buy expensive stuff, the companies that make that expensive stuff sell more of it and get richer themselves. The stock goes up. Whee! Everyone’s happy!
You go on ahead while I wrestle with one problem I have to overcome in my own personal situation before I can join you in getting rich on the backs of the superrich. The statisticians tell us that the poorest 20 percent of the population accounts for only 3 percent of consumption.
Obviously, I’m just not consuming enough. I’ve just got to figure out how to consume more. I’ll have more second helpings. Then I’ll have enough money to raise the money to get rich.
Won’t I?
Think big, I say.
©2006 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Dec. 4, 2006.
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