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| Everyone Wants A Shot At Being A Millionaire |
| By Maria Puente (excerpted)
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| August 16, 2000
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We live in a society gone millionaire mad. Our national fable used to be: Any kid can grow up to be president. Now we dream that any kid can grow up to be a millionaire, then run for president.
We are bombarded with tales of millionaires, how they achieved success, how anyone can be a success. In the media, it's all millionaires, all the time. Since January 1999, USA TODAY alone has run 694 stories in which the term "millionaire" appears.
The defining moment for our current obsession has to be ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which exploded off our TV screens last summer. Millions of Americans watch three nights a week as ordinary Joes attempt to answer a series of trivial questions in hopes of winning the top $1 million prize.
Then there's Survivor, the CBS "reality" show in which a bunch of wacky Americans spend 39 days on a remote island eating icky stuff and engaging in absurd competitions, hoping to survive long enough to win the $1 million prize that will be awarded next week.
And don't forget Fox's Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? special, in which apparently sane-if-not-sensible women competed to marry a stranger on national TV because he was supposed to be worth $2 million. (He wasn't, but bride Darva Conger still cashed in with a Playboy pictorial.)
But millionaire madness goes beyond even TV foolishness:
- Millionaire magazine, dedicated to spotlighting the very best goodies for its rich readers, has more than tripled its circulation, to 100,000, in two years. Marketing chief Chip Chambers says there are 476,000 millionaires on its mailing list.
- $1 million prizes are turning up on the Internet. For instance, you can win by surfing the Web through the portal site iWon.com.
- Colossal rewards are being offered as gimmicks at sporting events. Fans have won $1 million or more by kicking a football, sinking a putt, shooting a basketball, swatting a baseball and even pitching horseshoes at a racetrack.
- The inheritance tax, which Congress has voted to repeal (and President Clinton has promised to veto), applies to only 2% of the population, or estates worth more than $675,000. Yet polls show up to 70% of Americans support repeal, suggesting many people think it might apply to them some day.
- Click on Amazon.com and type in the M-word. In a blink, 207 titles pop up. How to be a millionaire, how to think like one, live like one, marry one, diet like one, retire like one, golf like one. The Millionaire Next Door is a mega-seller, and co-author Thomas Stanley has become a millionaire himself by revealing the "secrets" of ordinary schmoes who made it big.
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