Clearly, it's time for you to eat that cookie I gave you.

And there are now 793 billionaires in the world. Gotta love that trickle-down economy, spreading the wealth around like that.

Not to be confused with the other billion, which is the number of people the UN says lack safe water supplies.

Gill and Melinda are a role model for the noveau riche list.

But I fear they are in a minority.....

Need the statistic on newly minted third world money bags --- in a decade, I predict, 50 percent will be
Asian.

Bill's problem is that he has no freaking clue how to spend money. Helping the poor and the sick? Whatever. If I had $50 billion dollars, I be driving my three aircraft carriers up and down the lake all day launching raids on Renton. I'd buy South Dakota, paint every building in the place hot pink and change their state song to something from the sound of music. I'd have an army of trained monkeys.

Sadly, I'm worth only $72.50 (up $7.25 from last year) but I spend every damn bit of it the best it can possibly be spent (ie on booze).

I finally understand the benefit of economic polarization and trickle down economics.

I think people forget that if all that wealth were distributed equally, we'd all have money and we'd all be able to afford things we otherwise couldn't afford, and to buy more food and drink than we normally would. Which means prices of goods would have to go up due to supply and demand. The mass availability of money would also lead to severe inflation, spiking prices even further. Your $2 cup of coffee would become a $10 cup of coffee, gas would spike to $12 a gallon, without any influence from car makers or OPEC, and so on.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We should almost be thankful that billionaires are hoarding their billions.

I know I'll get flamed for this, but seriously, it's in the best interests of the nation's economy that this money not flow around so much.