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merit, but even these relative pittances are offset by the appalling illustrations of opulent decadence, such as the dream house young Bill Gates is building in the Seattle area for himself and his bride. With forty thousand square feet of living space at a cost of some $30 million, it goes far beyond Thorstein Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption.
    But if thoughtful Americans do not waste time envying the recipients of great wealth, they are obligated to consider the evils that ensue when a nation’s wealth is distributed with cruel unfairness. In late June 1996 a study group at the University of Michigan, which has been conducting an ongoing analysis of how the wealth of America is distributed, released data proving conclusively that the rich families in America were indeed getting richer by the hour, while the people at the bottom of the economic ladder remained in dire poverty. More specifically, as reported by
The New York Times
, the Michigan data found that ‘The most prosperous 10 percent of American households held 61.1 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1989 and 66.8 percent in late 1994.’ Just two days before the Michigan figures were announced, the Census Bureau released its own study of the same phenomena, confirming that there is an ever-widening disparity between the rich and other segments of society.
    My own prediction based on the Michigan data is that year by year the discrepancy between rich and poor will grow wider until finally it will become intolerable. If my extrapolations are correct, I would expect that some time in the next century something will snap and there will be a violent upheaval. The grossly unequal distribution of wealth is felt most brutally in the family incomes of the very poor. The government’s 1993 definition of the poverty level for a family of three is a family income of less than $11,522 a year; in the United States in that year 15.1 percent of the nation’s population fell below the official government poverty level. Only government intervention in the form of food stamps, rental allowances and aid for the children of deprived families enabled these very poor to continue to function even at a very low level.
    The plight of our poor today is similar to what the dispossessed suffered in medieval Europe or what they experienced in Dickensian Britain a century and a half ago. We have made some progress in caring for our poor, but not nearly what a great industrial nation should have achieved.
    Forbes
magazine, in its issue of November 21, 1994, revealed a nasty secret about how some of the very rich handle their wealth. The magazine listed six American multibillionaires by name and business affiliation who had discovered a clever trick for avoiding taxes on the yearly income from their investments. A billion dollars prudently invested can yield many millions of income every year without invading the principal. According to
Forbes
, these six billionaires, who were named and photographed by
Forbes
, simply left the United States, legally renouncing their American citizenship, and enjoyed millions of dollars of tax-free income. The story was also picked up by
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal.
    Most conspicuous among the expatriates identified by
Forbes
was young John T. Dorrance III, scion of the Campbell Soup Company,who resides in Ireland. The Campbell heir’s fortune is similar to that of the Ford family’s in that both fortunes were acquired by providing the nation with a much-sought-after commodity—in Ford’s case a reasonably priced automobile, in Campbell’s a good canned soup that quickly established itself as a best buy in the marketplace. But there the similarity ends because Ford’s family used much of its fortune to endow a major foundation that has sponsored many worthwhile charities and studies of American life, whereas, although Campbell Soup also has a foundation, a Campbell heir has opted, according to Forbes, to leave the country