Friday, September 30, 2005
If you are poor, you will not find your name listed among "The Forbes 400," Forbes magazine's annual estimation of the net bottom-lines of the wealthiest men and women in the country. It's always fun and rewarding to peruse the rising and falling fortunes on Forbes' famous list, which is still topped by Bill Gates III's $51 billion. Perennial No. 2, super-investor Warren Buffett, had a tough year and must make due with $41 billion. It was a good year for oil and gas moguls, real estate barons, casino tycoons and guys who own companies named Google. But competition for the top 400 is getting tougher. This year, there are 374 who are at least billionaires and you had to be worth $900 million to make the cut. Feel sorry for cartoon king Jeffrey Katzenberg and his $890 million. Forbes also includes a smart column by Dan Seligman that puts the notorious income gap between rich and poor into proper perspective. As Seligman points out, it's true that the rich-poor gap is greater in growing America than in the sclerotic economies of Europe. But the gap hasn't been especially awful during G.W. Bush's regime because of the tax cuts the New York Times is forever editorializing about, he shows. And it's been widening steadily for the past 30 years. Meanwhile, Time can't pass up the chance to sell some extra newsstand copies by blaming Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the environmentalists' all-purpose cause of every earthly climatic disaster or anomaly -- global warming. OK, so Time's editors wouldn't be so commercially craven. But with "Are We Making Hurricanes Worse?" blaring on its cover and "Global Warming: The Culprit?" inside, Time leaves no doubt where it stands on global warming. Actually, the article is fairly balanced. After asking whether global warming is to blame for the recent trend of more powerful and more deadly category 4 and 5 hurricanes such as Rita and Katrina, it shows that it's an extremely complex and debatable scientific puzzle that has plenty of room for skepticism. Time also quotes several experts who make the case that it's an unlikely, unprovable or faulty hypothesis that global warming is spawning bigger hurricanes. But Time, denying evidence to the contrary that its own article presents, ultimately concludes that human-caused climate change is the culprit. It essentially says Washington had better wise up about greenhouse emissions and "bring our climate ledgers back into balance" before an annoyed Mother Nature fixes the atmosphere herself.
