Those people who analyze Census data had this news to share: A high percentage of Boulder County residents are white-collar workers and wealthy. There's news to blow your socks off. Who knew?

It's impossible, after all, to gauge the wealth of this community by the plethora of Mercedes Benz SUVs, Jaguars and BMW convertibles parked along Pearl Street. You certainly can't tell by all those local teens who don't have to hold jobs in the summer. And the many moms who hang out at the gym, in the beauty salon and at the mall and call that a busy day give you no clue to our community's economic status.

It's good we have those Census folks to discover these things for us. Otherwise, we might have mistaken Boulder for a racially and economically diverse, working-class community. And just think what that would do to property values.

Secretary of State Colin Powell announced this week that the United States is committed to eliminating the trade in human beings that is thriving worldwide. As many as four million people are bought, sold, transported across borders and held against their will each year, Powell said. About 50,000 people are brought into the United States each year. Most of the victims are women and children, and many work in forced prostitution. It is, say human-rights activists, nothing more than modern-day slavery.

While Powell made this welcome announcement, he didn't say exactly what the government had in mind when it comes to combating the evil of trafficking human beings into the United States. The government did, however, say that it will take steps to penalize nations that make no effort to address the crisis.

While it's good to fight the bad guys-and the people who buy and sell people are bad guys-it doesn't hurt to wage that war at home first before you start threatening to wage it elsewhere.

Traffic congestion is growing in Portland-a town the city of Boulder sometimes tries to emulate-at the fastest rate in the nation, according to Randal O'Toole, author of The Vanishing Automobile and a free-market environmentalist with Oregon's Thoreau Institute.

Like Boulder, Portland has limited outward sprawl with "Urban Growth Boundaries" that surround the developable area with open space, causing greater residential densities, more traffic and more pollution, O'Toole told an audience Monday at the Independence Institute in Golden.

Adopting the policy that "congestion is a good thing," Portland has devoted most of its transportation resources to mass transit projects for the past 20 years. The result? A whole 2.5 percent of all transportation trips in Portland are accomplished by bus or train, O'Toole said. In Denver, which formed RTD in the early 1980s, mass transit ridership is a whopping 1.3 percent, he added.

Portland is also shifting its growth problems to nearby communities, such as Vancouver, Wash., which is growing at a rate of more than 200 percent. The theory that greater urban densities will reduce traffic and the need for highways is disproved by Los Angeles, which has the nation's highest urban density and what's considered a lot of highways, O'Toole said, although L.A. has the fewest miles of highways, per capita, of all large American cities.

To solve Colorado's growing traffic problems, O'Toole suggested more toll/HOT lanes, breaking up the RTD transit monopoly and neighborhood-level planning.

Writing recently in the Denver Post and speaking at the Libertarian state convention in Leadville, Salida-based columnist Ed Quillen suggested that Colorado adopt "Stupid Zones" to avoid the futile wasting of resources fighting fires to save homes that were built too far into forest fire territory.

The burning of West Glenwood and the Hayman fire illustrate Quillen's point. Forest fires are inevitable, and taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing homeowners rich enough to live among trees. Quillen doesn't want to restrict people's freedom to live where they want, but he sees no reason for taxpayers to subsidize the more extreme demands for rural fire protection and rural police protection.

"People who moved into the Stupid Zones would just not receive governmental services," Quillen suggested. "They'd be on their own, come hell or high water."

The logic of denying governmental services could be applied to "stupid" housing developments in floodplains or forests, he argued. Nothing would prevent insurance companies from assessing the risks and charging appropriately to protect stupid people and their homes.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com