A gusher of campaign cash is driving our politicians to
comfort the already comfortable.
Fifty years ago,
average Americans lived in a society where less than $10 of every $100 in
personal income went to the nation’s richest 1 percent.
Our top 1 percent are
now grabbing just under 20 percent of America’s income, double the 1963 level.
How did this happen?
We Americans certainly never voted for this upward redistribution. In all the
years since Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, no candidates
ever campaigned on a platform that called for enriching America’s already rich.
This doesn’t make
sense. Americans, after all, live amid democratic institutions. Why haven’t the
American people, through these institutions, been able to undo the public
policies that squeeze the bottom 99 percent and lavishly reward the crew at the
top?
Why, in other words,
hasn’t democracy slowed rising inequality?
Four political
scientists take a crack at answering exactly this
question in the current issueof
the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The four analysts —
Stanford’s Adam Bonica, Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole from the
University of Georgia, and New York University’s Howard Rosenthal — lay out a
nuanced reading of our political scene that explores everything from the
partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts to voter turnout by income
level.
But one particular
reality dramatically drives their analysis: Societies that let wealth
concentrate at enormously intense levels, the four show, will quite predictably
end up with a wealthy class who can concentrate enormous resources on getting
their way.
These wealthy underwrite
political campaigns. They spend fortunes on lobbying. They keep politicians and
bureaucrats “friendly” to their interests with a revolving door that promises
lucrative employment in the private sector.
Just how deeply have
America’s super-rich come to dominate our political process? Bonica and his
co-authors offer up a revealing anecdote: Back in 1980, no American gave out
more in federal election contributions than Cecil Haden, the owner of a tugboat
company. Haden contributed what would, in today’s dollars, amount to about
$1.72 million, almost six times more than any other political contributor in
1980.
In the 2012 election
cycle, by contrast, just one deep-pocket couple alone, gaming industry giant Sheldon
Adelson and his wife Miriam, together shelled out $103.4 million to bend
politics in their favored wealth-concentrating direction.
The Adelsons sit
comfortably within the richest 0.01 percent of America’s voting-age
population. Over 40 percent of the contributions to American political
campaigns are now emanating from this super-rich elite strata.
In the 1980s, campaign
contributions from the top 0.01 percent roughly equaled the campaign
contributions from all of organized labor. In 2012, America’s top 0.01 percent
all by themselves outspent labor by more than four-to-one.
Donors in this top
0.01 percent, Bonica and his colleagues point out, “give pretty evenly to
Democrats and Republicans” — and they get a pretty good return on their
investment. Both “Democrats as well as Republicans,” the four analysts observe,
have come to “rely on big donors.”
What has this reliance
produced? Nothing good for average Americans. Back in the 1930s, for instance,
Democrats championed the financial industry regulations that helped create a
more equal mid-20th century America. In our time, significant numbers of
Democrats have joined with Republicans to undo these regulations.
Conventional
economists, the new paper by Bonica and his fellow analysts adds, tend to
ascribe rising inequality to broad trends like globalization and technological
change — and ignore the political decisions that determine how these trends
play out in real life.
But new technologies,
the four political scientists counter, don’t automatically have to concentrate
wealth — and these new technologies wouldn’t have that impact if our
intellectual property laws, a product of political give-and-take, better
protected the public interest.
But too many lawmakers
and other elected leaders can’t see that “public interest.” Cascades of cash —
from America’s super rich — have them conveniently blinded.
OtherWords columnist Sam Pizzigati is an
Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. His latest book is The Rich Don’t
Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American
Middle Class. OtherWords.org