Ten Million Millionaires

According to this article on the CNN website this morning, the number of persons in the world with total assets of more than a million dollars has now exceeded ten million.

Ten million millionaires. That's a lot.

Of course, I'm not one of them, nor am I ever likely to be. I'm just an ordinary fellow who's happy when the balance in his checkbook has four figures, and they're not evenly divided on the left and right of the decimal point. If the bills are paid and there's enough left over for a new book or a few downloads from iTunes or a Berry Smoothie at Costco, I'm a happy guy.

But then, a million isn't what it used to be. At one time, a millionaire was someone who'd really made it, who commanded respect in the corridors of economic power. To paraphrase a brokerage firm's ad, when a millionaire talked, people listened.

Nowadays, the millionaires get sent out of meetings to fetch coffee for the billionaires. And I know from countless Pentagon budget meetings over the years that a million is an almost embarrassingly small number...many budget figures are rounded to the nearest million. Millions are almost decimal dust on the economic floor. If your program has a budget of a mere million dollars, it's liable to be axed to help pay for something bigger.

If you're one of those newly minted millionaires, I don't mean to rain on your parade. Congratulations, pip-pip-cheerio, and all that. Just remember that money can't buy you friends.

But it can get you a better class of enemy. It worked for America, after all.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo