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There's a lot of interesting stuff in Jon Chait's reply to Will Wilkinson based on a video dialogue about politics and inequality, with one point standing out to me:
One liberal complaint about inequality holds that it increases the political influence of the rich, thereby locking in even more inequality. Wilkinson scoffs at this prospect, pointing to rich voters' support for Barack Obama over John McCain. Oddly, Wilkinson confines his analysis to campaigning and pays no attention to governing. While it's true that many rich people used their money to help bring about Democratic control of Washington, every day brings a new example of the rich using their money to ensure that Democrats pose the least possible harm to their interests. Democrats in Congress have abandoned Obama's sensible call to limit deductions for the top bracket, backed away from an upper-income surtax to pay for health care despite favorable polls, shot down bank nationalization, and on and on.This is very important. Even in those election cycles in which more wealthy people than one might expect support Democrats, inequality still has a powerful and self-reinforcing effect on policy outcomes. In addition to the examples Chait cites, the great political scientist Larry Bartels has found systematic evidence for the disproportionate effect of the affluent on legislators:
Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion.A similar point can be made about the effects of Senate malapportionment that Matt and Ezra discussed recently. As Matt says, the fact that the gross over-representation of small states doesn't necessarily have strong partisan effects certainly doesn't mean that it doesn't have substantial (and pro-conservative) ideological effects. The prospects for a good health-care reform bill would obviously look a lot better in a Senate in which New York and California and Illinois were fairly represented, even if the partisan distribution of senators was the same.--Scott Lemieux
