A recent editorial from the LA Times was reprinted in the Akron Beacon Journal and is worth reading in full. It was written by Benjamin Page and Larry Bartels, both Political Scientists. But we should not hold that against them, it is still worth reading. Really. I interjected in red.
Over the past two years, President
Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal
budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early
2011, only about 12 percent of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as
the nation’s most important problem. Two to three times as many cited
unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country.
Point #1: Americans are concerned about jobs a lot more than about the national debt right now.
So why did policymakers focus so
intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that
saw the deficit as the nation’s priority had more clout than the majority that
didn’t.
Point #2: Good question, and it is important to ask better questions. And the affluent bias built into our political system (see EE Schattschneider among others) is a very solid starting point for a great answer.
We recently conducted a survey of
top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago
area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political
attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of
this top 1 percent of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government
spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as
often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue.
Point #3: Not a conspiracy theory. It should be no surprise, or even a concern, that the wealthiest want to protect their own interests, as we all do. The concern is their disproportionate (and too often hidden) capacity to re-present their private interests as if these were the top priority public interest.
If the concerns of the wealthy carry
special weight in government — as an increasing body of social scientific
evidence suggests — such extreme differences between their views and those of
other Americans could significantly skew policy away from what a majority of
the country would prefer. Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was
an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political
reach of the very wealthy.
Point #4: We risk moving toward (or already live in) a plutocracy instead of a democracy.
While we had no way to measure
directly the political influence of those surveyed, they did report themselves
to be highly active politically.
Two-thirds of the respondents had
contributed money (averaging $4,633) in the most recent presidential election,
and fully one-fifth of them “bundled” contributions from others. About half
recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly
half (44 percent) of those contacts concerned matters of relatively narrow
economic self-interest rather than broader national concerns. This kind of
access to elected officials suggests an outsized influence in Washington.
Point #5: Not a direct measure, but at the same time I cannot imagine contributing over $4,000 in a campaign, have never been approached about bundling during a round of golf, and I am fairly certain that it does not matter what issues I want to raise in my efforts to contact members of Congress.
On policy, it wasn’t just their
ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents
out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor
raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement
programs like Social Security and health care be cut to balance the budget.
Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those
programs.
Point #6: Again, holding a self-interested position is not a surprise other than the disproportionate capacity to influence public policy in support of that position. Sidebar: My reading of the challenges we face suggests that we need to do both for the long-term security of all Americans, but that we need to focus on job creation first. Faith in austerity measure is largely a hoax.
While the wealthy favored more
government spending on infrastructure, scientific research and aid to
education, they leaned toward cutting nearly everything else. Even with
education, they opposed things that most Americans favor, including spending to
ensure that all children have access to good-quality public schools, expanding
government programs to ensure that everyone who wants to go to college can do
so, and investing more in worker retraining and education.
Point #7: Even when we dig deeper, the same self-interest as public interest pattern emerges.
The wealthy opposed — while most
Americans favor — instituting a system of national health insurance, raising
the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax
Credit and providing a “decent standard of living” for the unemployed. They
were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for
those who cannot find private employment.
Unlike most Americans, wealthy
respondents opposed increased regulation of large corporations and raising the
“cap” that exempts income above $113,700 from the FICA payroll tax. And unlike
most Americans, they oppose relying heavily on corporate taxes to raise revenue
and oppose taxing the rich to redistribute wealth.
Some of the differences between the
political views of the wealthy and other Americans may be explained by
differences in the two groups’ economic experiences and self-interest. The
wealthy are likely to have better information about the costs of government
programs (for which they pay a lot of taxes) than about the benefits of those
programs. They don’t usually have to rely on Social Security, for example, let
alone food stamps or unemployment insurance.
Another possibility is that the
wealthy — who tend to be highly educated, well informed and committed to
charitable giving — seek the common good as they see it, and know better than
average Americans what sorts of policies would benefit us all. On the issue of
federal deficits, for example, the public has come to see government debt as an
increasingly important problem over the past two years, reducing the gulf
between their views and those of the wealthy. Is that because the wealthy were
ahead of the curve, or because their concern helped stimulate a steady drumbeat
of deficit alarmism in the media and in Washington?
Our pilot study included a
relatively small number of wealthy citizens, and they were all from a single
metropolitan area. A larger-scale national study is needed to pin down more
precisely the views of wealthy Americans about public policy. We need to
understand how they formed the preferences they have, and how wealthy people
from different regions, industries, and social backgrounds differ in their
political views and behavior. We also need to understand more about their
political clout.
Our initial results suggest the
wealthy have very different ideas than other Americans on a variety of policy
issues. If their influence is far greater than that of ordinary people, what
does that mean for American democracy?
Page is a political science
professor at Northwestern University and co-author of Class War? What Americans
Really Think About Economic Inequality. Bartels is a political science
professor at Vanderbilt University and author of Unequal Democracy: The
Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. They wrote this for the Los Angeles
Times.
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