okhorov on prostitution ring charges, then released him four days later. Last week, Misha’s friends in Moscow’s exclusive Rublyovka district announced plans to boycott Courchevel, the village where rich Russians have been regularly supping, ever since the 1990s, on $1,000 side dishes of Beluga caviar. They're now switching their holiday reservations to Aspen. Look for local Aspen real estate — average single-home sale price in 2006: $5.38 million — to rocket even higher . . .

More evidence of just how unequal the United States has become — from the Social Security Administration. Brookings economist Gary Burtless has crunched the data Social Security collects from the W-2 forms that everyone who gets a paycheck has to have filed. Back in 1990, the W-2 data show, paychecks at the top 99.99th percentile outpaced the paychecks of the median, or most typical, American worker by 46 times. In 2005, paychecks at the top 99.99th ran 81 times more than the median paycheck. The W-2 data, Burtless cautions, understate overall inequality. W-2s only cover paycheck income. Not tallied by Social Security: dividends, interest, and capital gains, sources of income that all go disproportionately to the affluent . . .

If you stole $2,000 from a 7-Eleven, then dropped $25 in a Salvation Army bucket on your way out, would you have the nerve to cite charity as a reason the judge should go easy on your sentencing? Walter Forbes, the CEO who helped create the multi-billion-dollar Cendant company, thought his “long history” of charitable good works might be enough to win leniency last week at his sentencing for the biggest corporate fraud of the 1990s. He thought wrong. Federal district judge Alan Nevas sentenced Forbes to 12-plus years behind bars. Forbes — no relation to the Forbeses of magazine fame — had pocketed $100 million “inflating income to satisfy Wall Street analysts” and built up a net worth that totaled $200 million. His charitable donations totaled $2.5 million, a bit more than half the cost of the $4.65 million seven-bedroom, six-bath mansion he bought in 1997. That $2.5 million in donations failed to impress Judge Nevas. Given the Forbes net worth, the judge noted, the Forbes charitable impulse seemed “very modest.”

America’s wealthiest no longer have to pretend they know what’s going on when their tax advisers start babbling about “labyrinthine trusts” and other financial esoterica. That’s because top universities are now offering courses in wealth management for mega-millionaires. One such course, a five-day affair at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, aims at “students” worth at least $25 million and charges $8,755. Not a bad deal. The course fee covers meals . . .

To take advantage of this year’s hottest wealth management tip, wealthy Americans actually don’t have to go to school. They just have to read the Wall Street Journal. Last week’s Journal carried a step-by-step guide sure to help deep pockets exploit a new zero percent tax rate meant for modest-income Americans. Here’s the scoop: Starting in 2008, taxpayers in the two lowest tax brackets — this year, that means couples who make no more than $63,700 — won’t have to pay any tax on income from the sale of stock they’ve held for over a year. But top-bracket taxpayers who make many, many times $63,700 can enjoy that zero percent rate, too, simply by passing stashes of their stock to their lower-income kids and grandkids, who, notes the Journal, “may then be able to turn around and sell the securities tax free next year.” But the wealthy will have to move quick. The special zero percent tax rate on long-term capital gains, enacted as part of the 2003 Bush tax cut, will expire after 2010 unless Congress acts before then.

The 'Secrets' to State Economic Success

State legislatures have now begun their 2007 sessions, and lawmakers are already filing batches of new bills to make their locales more “business friendly,” mostly by cutting taxes on corporations or legislating end runs around regulations businesses find bothersome.

The more appealing states can make themselves to footloose businesses, the lawmakers behind these “economic development” initiatives maintain, the better off their state economies will be.

CFED, a nonprofit originally created as the Corporation for Enterprise Development, has been challenging this “smokestack-chasing” approach to development for nearly 30 years. Handing out tax breaks “that benefit a few at the expense of the rest of the community,” CFED believes, can never build a healthy economic foundation.

What can? CFED has just released its 2007 Development Report Card for the States, a compendium of 67 different measures that rank states on the factors that make for real and lasting economic development: “dependable infrastructure, good schools, a healthy environment, a good quality of life, accountable and transparent government, financial security for households, and a lack of strong divisions across, for instance, class and race.”

The measures that go into the new CFED Report Card track everything from broadband access to affordable housing, and equity figures large in the CFED calculations. The Report Card computes an Equity Subindex that combines four different sets of stats on how equally states distribute their income dollars.

The distributional gaps among states, the CFED Report Card data show, can run startlingly wide. In Louisiana and New York, the two states with the least equal incomes, households in the top 20 percent average over 14 times more income than households in the bottom 20 percent.

In Iowa and Wyoming, families in the top 20 percent bracket make less than eight times the bottom-bracket income average.

Overall, combining income distribution, rate of change in income distribution, poverty rates, and disparities between rural and urban areas, Vermont, Hawaii, and Wisconsin rank as the three most equitable states. The three least: Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

A Surprise Senate Strike on Stealth Wealth

Most working Americans with 401(k) plans know how “deferred compensation” works. If you have a 401(k), you can have a chunk of your paycheck set aside and parked in a special account where that chunk can grow, tax-free, until you retire and claim it.

Most Americans with 401(k)s also know that these “deferred compensation” plans come with limits. Under the law, 401(k) plans can only shield so much of your pay — $15,500 this year, for everyone under 50 — from taxes.

Here’s what most working Americans don’t know about deferred compensation: Over the past quarter-century top corporate executives have been able to defer, into tax-free pots, millions of dollars a year, not through 401(k)s but through personalized pay deferral plans open only to top corporate brass.

Last week, in a Capitol Hill move that caught corporate lobbyists by surprise, a Senate panel moved to place a $1 million cap on the annual pay CEOs and other top execs can park away tax-free.

This week that proposed cap will likely move to the Senate floor. What happens next, in the Senate and then the House, may well define just how much clout Corporate America holds in the new Democratic-majority Congress. We have more in a special Too Much analysis.