And this year, there’s a lot to drool over. The number of billionaires has risen from 140, 20 years ago when Forbes first started ranking them, to an astounding 793.
 

But instead of sighing that Bill Gates is yet again Top Billionaire, wouldn’t it be great if more reporters actually explored what this 566 percent surge in global billionaires means for the rest of the world’s 6.6 billion people?
 

It takes a blogger such as Tony Hendra to put the new wealth data into perspective. After noting the collective net worth of America’s poorest plunged from $425 to $113 at the same time Forbes’ billionaires blossomed, Hendra writes in the The Huffington Post:
With no unions, no job projection, no contracts, America’s poorest can be fired with impunity and without notice, making them willing to do just about anything to hang on to their pathetic salaries. It doesn’t hurt that for every person with a job, five other members [of] the Forbes 40,000,000 are waiting outside the jobsite to grab their jobs if they’re fired, fall sick, are injured or killed. The effects on productivity are stellar; the ever-expanding bottom-lines of the Forbes 400 are being pushed to unprecedented heights by an ever-expanding work-force of meek, cooperative, docile, pliable, low-cost neo-slaves.
 

In China, which boasts eight new billionaires—four times as many as last year—China’s  parliament yesterday approved a plan to close the gap between urban rich and rural poor after what an  Austrialian newspaper calls “one of the most robust debates over the pace of reform since the days of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.”
 

Meanwhile, back in the United States, where five of the top 25 billionaire spots are owned by Wal-Mart’s Walton family—the top 10 percent of households saw their net worth rise by 6.1 percent between 2001 and 2004, while the bottom 10 percent saw it decline, according to a Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances report issued last month.
The bottom 10 percent’s assets once equaled their liabilities, but by 2004, those households owed an average of $1,400 more than their total assets. Average incomes, adjusting for inflation, fell 2.3 percent, the report said.
 

Meanwhile, the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute reported today that the Fed survey also showed minority incomes were about 56 percent of whites and minority net worth only 27 percent of whites.
 

But I bet you didn’t read about the new U.S. wage gap in the mainstream media.