Richistan: A journey through the American wealth boom and the lives of the new rich. A new book by WSJ writer Robert Frank, reviewed in The American. One quote:
It’s not the existence of these well-heeled, free-spending Americans that’s remarkable, Frank writes, but their sheer abundance. In 1995, there were 230,000 U.S. households worth at least $10 million and 50,000 households worth at least $25 million (in inflation-adjusted terms). In 2004, there were 530,000 and 110,000 such households, respectively. The accumulated wealth of America’s top one percent of earners—about $1.35 trillion—equals more than the total national incomes of Canada, France, and Italy. Perhaps most striking, roughly half of all American wealth has been created in the past ten years.
What a wonderful thing it is that, if you want big money, you have the chance to make it.
The reclamation of LA's Skid Row. Heather MacDonald in City Journal. A quote
For 25 years, the advocates used lawsuits and antipolice propaganda to beat back every effort to restore sanity to Skid Row. They concealed the real causes of homelessness under a false narrative about a callous, profit-mad society that abused the less fortunate. The result: a level of squalor that had no counterpart in the United States. Smith’s policing initiatives—grounded in the Broken Windows theory of order maintenance—ended that experiment in engineered anarchy, saving more lives in ten months than most homeless advocates have helped over their careers. The forces of lawlessness are regrouping, however, and Smith’s successes may wind up reversed in a renewed attack on the police.
and
An Urban Land Institute study warned in 1987 that the “invasion of the homeless” was threatening the older SRO population and local businesses; stronger police protection was essential, argued the institute. The recommendation failed to take into account a second new population invading Skid Row: homeless advocates. Some of the same groups that had challenged public-order laws and pushed for the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill now seized on the resulting homeless for a host of ends, including a right to housing and further restrictions on the police. A made-for-the-media “tent city” erected by sundry homeless advocates outside City Hall in December 2004, for example, sought to end workfare and job-search requirements for welfare recipients—measures that had nothing to do with why people were on the streets.
Read the whole thing.
