The Super-Rich Get Richer: Forbes 400 Are All Billionaires

The list of D.C. billionaires is topped by Danaher Corp. founder Mitchell P. Rales (No. 107, $2.6 billion), followed by his brother, Steven M. Rales (No. 117, $2.5 billion), new Washington Nationals owner and real estate mogul Theodore N. Lerner (No. 242, $1.5 billion), and Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson (No. 374, $1 billion). McLean candy czar Forrest E. Mars Jr. is Virginia's top billionaire (No. 21, $10.5 billion), while Richard E. Marriott is Maryland's wealthiest man (No. 197, $1.8 billion).

The enormous sums spur the natural question: Is it good, bad or neither that wealth is accumulating so fast that numbers begin to lose their meaning? (Requisite illustration: A stack of 1 billion $1 bills would reach a height of 80 miles.)

On the one hand, the fortunes have spawned a new age of philanthropy, by which private individuals can try to effect change with the power and reach of a government but without the bureaucratic shackles that often thwart aid efforts.

Bill and Melinda Gates, for instance, created a foundation with assets of $30 billion that focuses much of its effort on improving health for the world's poor. Warren E. Buffett (No. 2, $46 billion), a director of The Washington Post Co. along with Melinda Gates, said in June that he would give away much of his fortune to charity, most of it to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The gestures recall the large-scale largesse of 19th-century capitalists named Vanderbilt and Rockefeller.

Yet not everyone finds the billionaire boom beneficial.

"I think it's very bad," said Dean Baker, a macroeconomist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "If the U.S. had experienced really extraordinary growth, then maybe that would be the reason" for all the billionaires. Baker pointed out that U.S. economic growth in the past 25 years -- the period that hatched this crop of billionaires -- is actually slower than in the preceding quarter-century, which produced only 13 billionaires.

"If these people pull away so much wealth," he said, "that means everyone else has less."

The growth in the number of billionaires has been significantly aided by cuts in U.S. tax rates that allow the wealthy to keep more of their money, said Harvard University economics professor Larry Katz. Today's marginal tax rate for the richest Americans is 35 percent, down from more than 60 percent 25 years ago.

"We could do a lot more with the tax system and with policies . . . to help out those who are less fortunate," Katz said. On the other hand, "not every dollar that goes to a rich person is taken away from someone else."

Katz is of mixed mind about the billionaire boom.

"At one level, it leads to the possibility of great philanthropy," he said. "On the other level, it is a great concentration of wealth and power that can subvert other people's interests."

One-third of the Forbes 400 is concentrated in two places: California, which has 89 billionaires, and New York City, with 44.

The billionaire-free states are West Virginia, Vermont, Alaska, Maine, Delaware, Mississippi, Iowa, New Mexico, Kentucky and North Dakota. (South Dakota has one.) Even Wyoming, the least populous state, has a billionaire -- Christy Walton (No. 7, $15.6 billion), one of eight Wal-Mart family members on the list, four of whom are in the top 10.