Greed at a Glance
A weekly update on avarice in America and beyond

November 13, 2006

Last week’s sharpest electoral showdown over America’s increasingly intense concentration of wealth may have taken place in Washington State, where angry mega millionaires waged a ballot referendum battle to repeal a year-old state estate tax. Developer Martin Selig, the owner of Seattle property worth at least $378 million, contributed just under $1 million to the repeal effort. Washington's estate tax, he claimed, “hurts the middle class.” But the tax only impacts 250 estates a year, just a half percent of all deaths, and no couple with less than $4 million in wealth faces any state estate tax at all. The tax currently raises $100 million a year for education, and teachers and PTAs helped lead the opposition to repeal. On Election Day, they triumphed handily. Voters opted to preserve Washington’s state estate tax by a whopping 62-38 percent margin . . .

Inequality, new data from the United Nations make clear, continues to be a matter of life and death. Japan, the nation with the world's most equal distribution of income and wealth, once again sports the world’s longest life expectancy, at 82.2 years, reports the 2006 UN Human Development Report released last Thursday. The developed world’s most unequal nation, the United States, now ranks 30th on the global life expectancy list, at 77.5 years, despite spending nearly as much on health care as the rest of the world combined. In 1970, a much more equal United States ranked 12th. Notes Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington School of Public Health: “I have no idea how much farther we will descend. It just means that we all die much younger than we should.”

Two of Northern California’s top sports teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Athletics, last week announced they were moving south — to more lucrative pastures in Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley. The move, notes a San Jose Mercury News analysis, will help the two two teams “fill luxury boxes and premium seats, the lifeblood of stadium deals and revenue opportunities for pro sports franchises.” But San Francisco officials aren’t giving up yet. This week, the Mercury News reports, they’ll talk to 49ers owner John York, who says he’d consider staying put if San Francisco comes up with a stadium that ups the team’s current luxury suite complement by 40 percent and includes 7,500 club seats, the sorts of seating “typically purchased by companies or high-rollers.”

The world’s yacht set will be partying hearty next June in Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city and site of the 32nd America’s Cup, the world’s premiere yachting event since 1851. But the party figures to leave a bit of a hangover for local residents more apt to own rowboats than yachts. Housing costs in Valencia have been soaring. They jumped 30 percent in 2004 alone, the year after the city won hosting rights for the 2007 Cup. Swells from Europe and the United States started out buying luxury villas in orange-grove towns outside Valencia. Those villas now typically go for $1.24 million, and new buyers are zeroing in on previously overlooked Valencia neighborhoods. One of these, Russafa, used to be “very working-class,” local realtor Alex Crespo observes, “but now it’s very up-and-coming.”

Why do CEOs in the United States need such huge pay packages? A new USA Today report suggests an answer: How else are they going to afford multiple golf club memberships? At least 25 top U.S. CEOs, says USA Today, belong to at least three different golf clubs — average initiation fee, $60,000 — and that total, the paper adds, “likely understates the multiple memberships.” Indeed, a Golf Digest survey earlier this year estimated that 45 percent of Fortune 1,000 company CEOs belong to four or more golf clubs. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts belongs to five. Comcast insists that Roberts pays his own annual memberships. But other CEOs have their up-to-$80,000-or-more annual dues paid, as an executive perk, even after they retire. The current executive golf club king? That has to be Cardinal Health's Robert Walter, with six club memberships to his name.

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