Outis

Back again for my now weekly “post” and I’m going to take a pass on the revelations that the U.S. government has to pay “reporters” to write bad stories about Fidel Castro’s regime. (Like, wtf? Is it that hard?)

Instead, and on a day which is for reflection on other topics, my attention is on an internal threat to the American Way.

Income inequality:

First, some statistics. Between 1979 and 2003, the income of the richest one percent of Americans more than doubled, the income of the middle 15 percent grew by only 15 percent, and the income of the poorest 20 percent barely budged, according to the CBO. By the late 1990s, the richest one percent of Americans households had a third of all wealth in the economy, and took in 14 percent of the country’s income—a greater share than at any point since the Great Depression. These days you can’t swing a dead gerbil without hitting some leftist faithfully reciting these figures, but I thought I’d repeat them anyway.

…

To some extent, these findings are likely a result of the fact that elected officials tend to hail from the upper classes, and so tend to be the sort of people who worry more about the burden the estate tax imposes than, say, food insecurity or too-high heating bills. In 2003, financial records revealed that 40 senators and 123 representatives were millionaires. This shouldn’t be surprising. Without publicly-financed elections, it takes a good deal of personal wealth to run for office—the average Senate campaign in 2006 will cost about $10 million, minimum, according to a University of Washington study.

But that’s only the most obvious way economic power begets political power. Consider the fact that wealthy Americans are far more likely to vote: 86 percent of those in families with incomes over $75,000 reported voting in 1990, compared to only 52 percent of those in families with incomes under $15,000. Whether that’s because the well-off are more likely to believe that government will work for them—evidently a sound assumption—or because they have more time and opportunity to inform themselves and do their civic duty is unknown.

But it’s not just voting. People in the $75,000 bracket are much more likely to join a political advocacy group like the NRA or the NAACP (73 percent vs. 29 percent), and much more likely to make campaign contributions (56 percent vs. 6 percent). Indeed, in the 2000 election, 95 percent of those donors making substantial campaign contributions came from households making over $100,000. While high-income donors don’t usually bribe politicians to do their bidding, they do get more face time with their representatives, during which they can frame issues and concerns in ways amenable to their interests.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Politics, Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.