A quick update on avarice in America and beyond

Just what America needs: another “ego-seum.” That’s the new label for the private art museums billionaires the world over are building to house their personal art collections. The latest ego-seum will be rising in Los Angeles. Billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad are spending a reported $300 million to fashion enough exhibit space and operating endowment to display — on a rotating basis — their 2,000-piece contemporary art collection. Meanwhile, in Patterson, New Jersey, the new Urban Art Foundation this past weekend staged a graffiti artist “world cup” fundraiser to try and offset art teacher budget cutbacks in the New York metro area. About a fifth of New York City’s public schools are starting the new school year without a single certified teacher in the creative arts . . .

In 2009, a top hospitality industry trade journal noted last week, America’s hotel chains suffered — not surprisingly — “one of the worst operating performance years in the industry’s history.” Among those not suffering: the industry’s CEOs. In fact, details HospitalityNet, the top two dozen lodging execs pulled in about the same pay in 2009 they collected the year before. The industry’s top paycheck went to Walt Disney’s Robert Igor. He pulled in just over $29 million. The industry’s richest execs remain Carnival’s Micky Arison and Marriott’s J. W. Marriott, Jr. Both hold fortunes worth over $1 billion . . .

A top candidate for the leadership of South Korea’s main opposition party is calling for a new “wealth tax” on the fortunes of his nation’s richest 1 percent. The revenue from a wealth tax, says the Democratic Party’s Chung Dong-young, could raise 10 trillion won a year, about $8.5 billion, enough to secure pensions for South Korea’s elderly. A nation’s tax code, says Chung, ought to both raise revenue and “redistribute wealth.” Politicos who support social safety nets without proposing adequate funding for them, he adds, “are deceiving the public.”

In the UK, another nation with a leadership tussle in the main opposition party, a Labor Party lawmaker is echoing the South Korean wealth tax call. Andy Burnham, one of five hopefuls for Labor’s top slot, last week called for a “solidarity wealth tax” that would subject an individual’s total assets, less debt, to an annual levy. The Labor Party, says Burnham, must be “true to its redistributive roots.” Adds the Labor leadership candidate: “We must never be about courting elites: we must be about breaking them down.” Ed Miliband, a Burnham rival, is also stressing the need for Labor to be “standing for redistribution.” He last week won the backing of a key UK progressive journal, the New Statesman, for his commitment to “above all else, reducing inequality.”

An even stronger push for a wealth tax on accumulated fortune is coming in Germany where 86 percent of the public, according to a new Der Spiegel poll, want the rich to burden more of the cost of the current economic crisis. One group of concerned millionaires wants to see a wealth tax on Germans with assets over 500,000 euros, about $633,000. Political analysts are predicting that Germany’s opposition parties may soon unite to issue a similar wealth tax call. The income tax rate on Germany’s top income bracket now stands at 42 percent, down from 53 percent in 1998. The current U.S. top rate: 35 percent.