New Orleans:  Someone’s free, trial subscription to the Wall Street Journal has been finding its way into my mailbox at the office, so coming back into town on the weekend, I’ve swept them in a bag and later ended up leafing through them out of curiosity.  Some of it is interesting in a bizarre, reading a foreign language kind of way.

  One item the other day jumped out at me.  Seems in 2004 we hit a record for the number of families with household net worth of over $1,000,000.  There are now 7,500,000 millionaire families in the USA.  Furthermore, the WSJ informs me that these calculations are without including the value of a personal home.  To me that is even more staggering, since so much of an average family’s wealth is based on the value — and now often rising price — of their own home.  I can not even imagine how many more families might make the Millionaire’s Club if they could add the numbers of their house on to their net worth.  What do you figure?  Another one million?  More?  Either way it’s quite something and speaks volumes about the increasing gap between the rich and poor. 

  This club has become a mass-based phenomenon.  Organized labor only has about 5 million more members than this club, and arguably even without a membership dues, elected officers group, these millionaires, given the nature of political financing, have perhaps more raw power.  They definitely overwhelm any other group whether NRA, ACORN, Sierra Club, or whomever.  Maybe not the AARP, but a lot of them may overlap with the AARP for all I know.

  The Millionaire’s Club and its burgeoning membership is a social problem we better deal with soon before they are totally out of control, and they are pretty far gone now!