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WEST HARTFORD, Conn. - The enormity of the house Arnold Chase is building on Avon Mountain isn't fully apparent from the outside, where only 17,000 square feet of it lies in plain view. It's the two-level, 33,500-square-foot basement complex, complete with a 103-seat movie theater, ticket booth, concession stand, game room and music annex, that will make it New England's largest occupied single-family home. At nearly 50,900 square feet, the Chase home will be slightly larger than billionaire Bill Gates' home in Washington, about 4,000 square feet smaller than the White House and 20 times larger than the average-size home...

DELHI: Top private-equity and hedge fund managers made more in 10 minutes than average-paid US workers earned all of last year, according to a new study from two research groups. The 20 highest-paid fund managers made an average of $657.5 million, or 22,255 times the US average annual salary of $29,500, said the study, released on Wednesday by Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. The study cited data from the US Labor Department and Forbes magazine. “The fact that these pay levels for fund managers are so out-of-sight is going to drive up pay at...

So we are agreed. We are living in the second great Gilded Age, a time of startling personal wealth. In the West, the mansion after mansion with broad and rolling grounds; in the East, the apartments with foyers in which bowling teams could play. Or, on another level, the week's vacation in Disneyland or Dublin with the entire family--this in a nation in which, well within human memory, people with a week off stayed home and fixed things in the garage, or drove to the beach for a day and sat on a blanket from one of the kid's beds...

Before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the false-pretense Iraq war, the American way of life was already a global symbol of gluttony. If anything, the post-9/11 period has resulted in even more hoarding. In 2000, the size of the average American home was 2,266 square feet. Now it is 2,434 square feet, according to Census data, with the highest regional average right here in the Northeast at 2,556 square feet. Our homes are on average double the size of those in other Top 10 richest nations such as Japan or Switzerland according to the New York Times and the...

Artifact: A Chilling Tale of Global Warming Katherine Mangu-Ward | February 2007 Print Edition The United Nations has ventured into children’s publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made the rounds at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Kenya.The night after he loses the race by falling through a weak place in the ice, Tore has a dream in which he sees the Inuit goddess Sedna, who warns him that “rich...

Right after a year in which four million more jobs were created by Americans than lost, Jim Webb had the following commentary in his response to President Bush’s State of The Union Speech: “The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one...

The media and academic obsessions with economic "disparities" have gone international. Recent news stories proclaim that most of "the world's wealth" belongs to a small fraction of the world's people. Let's go back to square one. Just what is "the world's wealth"? You can check in your local phone book, surf the Internet or do genealogical research: There is no one named "The World." How can a non-existent being own wealth? Human beings own wealth. Once we put aside lofty poetic nonsense about "the world's wealth," we at least have a fighting chance of talking sense about realities. Who are...

The richest 2% of the world's population owns more than half of the world's household wealth.... ...The research indicates that assets of just $2,200 per adult place a household in the top half of the world's wealthiest. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world, just $61,000 in assets is needed. If you have more than $500,000, you're part of the richest 1%, the United Nations study says. Indeed, 37 million people now belong in that category.... ...Half the world, nearly 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day. The three richest people in the...

Democratic Senator Jim Webb embarrassed the state of Virginia by offering his support to the economic views of the Left Keynesians, in The Wall Street Journal, last November 15. He served these views up in didactic screed, worthy of The Unibomber Manifesto, which he entitled Class Struggle. The normative aspects smacked of a marginal college sophomore who was reading too much Enver Hoxha. It now turns out the factual basis of Webb's polemics is well; not so factual. In his guest editorial, Jim Webb argues that the top 1% of America's wage earners take home 16% of the national income....

Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half hold only 1 per cent of wealth. A survey released on Tuesday shows that middle-income countries with high growth rates still have a long way to go before they have a hope of catching up with the levels of prosperity of the richest.

A fall campaign pledge of the Democrats was to “make our economy fairer.” And if by “fair” they intend to make us marginally less productive, but more “equal” in terms of lower economic opportunity, their plan is eminently workable. At the heart of the Democrats’ fairness program is the desire to reduce the wealth gap between the rich and poor. According to a front-page story in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, “the gap between winners and losers in the American economy has widened over the last 20 years.” But this might seem odd given the events of the latest campaign...

Two days into the JonBenet Ramsey/John Karr media deluge, a mid-fortyish male in line next to me at a food shop groaned at the day's newspaper headlines. "Now," muttered this stranger--though he wore a baseball cap with bill turned backward, which suggested a few things about him one could know right off--"now we're not going to hear about anything but this damned story for the next six weeks." I sympathized, forbearing to tell him that it would have plenty of competition, what with the networks set to embark on round-the-clock wallowing in the Katrina anniversary.

Schnitt just announced the breaking news. The DNA for JM Karr is NOT a match for Jon Benet evidence.

For a woman who claims her life is 'mundane', JK Rowling likes a luxury holiday. In the past few years she has cruised the Galapagos at a cost of around £15,000, blown £14,000 on a holiday in Mauritius and enjoyed the comforts of a £6,000-aweek hotel in the Seychelles.Her latest outing, however, tops the lot. For, after a charitable engagement in New York, she and her family have decamped to the Hamptons, that millionaire's playground on the East Coast, to stay in an imposing seven-bedroom beachfront house. The cost - £76,000 a week.JK Rowling (and husband Neil) splashing about in...

Since the JonBenet Ramsey case burst back into the spotlight, much of the misinformation fed to the public has emerged again. Here's a little refresher course on what we know is real: The 93-page ruling by a U.S. district judge in a 2003 civil suit was the first real judicial analysis of evidence found at the scene. Judge Julie Carnes examined evidence gathered by police, pointed out shortcomings in the investigation and came to the conclusion that it was more likely that an intruder killed JonBenet than Patsy Ramsey. Here's the evidence we know: - An autopsy report noted injury...

Senators voted Thursday to reject a Republican effort to abolish taxes on inherited estates during an election year with control of Congress at stake. GOP leaders had pushed senators to permanently eliminate the estate tax, which disappears in 2010 under President Bush's first tax cut, but rears up again a year later. A 57-41 vote fell three votes short of advancing the bill. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the Senate will vote again this year on a tax that opponents call the "death tax." "Getting rid of the death tax is just too important an issue to give...

See for example this thread first. Exxon Mobil's retirement plan for their ex-CEO and chairman: Nearly $400 mill ! Not much compared to Bill-- one year's interest, to the Microsoft man.

WASHINGTON - Almost as certain as death and taxes is the public's feeling that the U.S. income tax system is not fair. An Ipsos Poll released this week found almost six of 10 people, 58 percent, say the system is unjust, a number that is virtually unchanged from two decades ago. ADVERTISEMENT People think the middle class, the self-employed and small businesses pay too much in taxes, the poll found. And they think those with high incomes and big businesses don't pay enough. The survey was conducted in the days before the mid-April deadline for filing income tax returns. Dissatisfaction...

President Bush reported adjusted gross income of $735,180 for last year, on which he paid $187,768 in federal taxes, according to the president's return released Friday by the White House. The White House also released the 2005 tax return filed by Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. According to the return, the Cheneys have overpaid their taxes this year and are entitled to a refund of about $1.9 million. Their adjusted gross income was about $8.82 million. In 2004, the president and first lady Laura Bush reported $784,219 in adjusted gross income and paid $207,307 in federal income...

Venezuelan middle class flees Chávez rule of hate By Sophie Arie in Caracas (Filed: 05/03/2006) Venezuela's once-thriving middle class is packing its bags and fleeing the country, afraid for the future as the socialist president, Hugo Chávez, calls on the slum-dwelling masses to rise up and seize wealth from those better off than themselves. Growing numbers of professionals, business owners and shopkeepers are fed up with the climate of hostility that the Left-wing president has encouraged in his effort to boost his populist credentials. President Hugo Chávez María Carolina García was blowing up helium balloons in her party-decorations shop in...