The Multi-Millionaire Next Door....

I've been conjuring a book. The kernel of the idea has been gestating for some time now. I will tell you in advance that I am not terribly proud of it, since it's a rather crass and mercenary idea. It is partly derivative of that great scene int he Farrelly Bros pic, There's Something About Mary, where the hero (played by Ben Stiller) picks up a crazed and murderous hitch-hiker who starts sounding off about his great idea for a mail order video entitled "Six-Minute Abs", which is bound to be a smash since the guy made such a killing with "Ten MIntue Abs", surely "Six-Mintue Abs" would be that much more irresistible. Applying this logic to the "can't fail" voyeurism of "The Millionaire Next Door", which it must be said is sorely in need of an update since inflation has made "The Millionaire Next-Door" not just completely pedestrian, but barely able to afford list price Business Class flights, or a nice Aryanly-engineered Vorschprung der technik automobile unless it be an Audi TT or heaven forbid, a Czech-made Volkswagen, let alone "fly private" or do a weeek at the Ritz in Aspen..

Indeed, as the end first decade of the new millenium approaches, the literary low-hanging fruit I am writing will be entitled "The Multi-Millionaire Next Door". This is vague enough that given the propensity of authorities to inflate, and their seeming unwillingness to countenance anything shy of a positive sign in the YoY growth rate, and Americans aversion to paying tax, my NEW version will have all-important shelf-life. Think about it: the seeming schmo next door to you. You thought he was "just a a mechanic" (not that thhere's anything wrong with that). But he bought that greasy garage (clearly not Germanic or Japanese one where you can eat off the floor) for $65,000 but a few years ago as the premises for his business. Today, thanks to Bush, Mssrs Greenspan, Bernanke, Zhou, and the BoJ, (and a shopping mall developed by William Simon across the street, the shack is worth $2mm (less the $40k mortgage)!! A multimillionaire! And YOU thought him PWT and wouldn't let your kids play theirs 'cause you sent your prats to private school, and because he drove a rusty '74 Dodge Pickup. Shame on you! So while you're leveraged to the hilt aspiring to the good life you deserve and are entitled to, your uneducated neighbour has just vaulted over your net-worth in the mere space of less than a decade!.

Chapter will discuss all your friends who you thought were crazy whimsically purchasing vacation flats in London, or on East Coast beach-front, or a slope-side condo when they so clearly couldn't afford it. Who's stupid now chump? Yup, anything more than two beds and purchased but a few years ago, and they are - yes, you guessed it - multimillionaires!! And chapter three? The frugal elderly widower, with her pension fund that her husband placed (against the advice of their doltish financial advisor) 100% into the Emerging Market Equity Fund just before he passed in 1999, and she's been too senile to do anything about it, not even opening the statements. When she kicks the bucket, PRESTO! a heart-warming story of her only son now a Multi-Millionaire. There's so many of them! Baseball, Basketball, football players! Insurance agents! Stockbrokers! not to mention Investment Bankers. And in the boardroom, the wealth has indeed been spread for no longer is it just the CEO, but the CFO, Marketiing Director, and heck, even the token female HR director is a multi-millionaire, whether through legal means or through back-handed backdating! Shit even Golfers and tennis players (my grandpa would have laughed if I'd told him THAT one when he was alive). And it doesn't end there! Even family-farmers, hispanics, Haitian immigrants, and blackpeople too (and you, who only thought that only Texans, Jews, and old WASP real estate families were multi-millionaires). How narrow-minded you are! Multimillionaire-ism has no racial, sex, industrial, nor even religious boundaries. It is the epitome of pervasive.

But by far, the greatest, most optimistic and uplifting message in this can't-miss, story-to-be about America, inflation, and it's most deserving and virtuous beneficiaries that you didn't even know existed, is that it is NOW possible, even PROBABLE, that EVERYONE can (and shortly will) be multi-millionaires, and I am going to be one who who introduced them all to you, and America, first!