Study: Polarization and Gridlock Work Well for the Wealthiest Americans

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/07



At the end of 2013, only 12 percent of Americans held a positive view of Congress – three points above the all-time low set earlier in the year, according to Gallup. Two out of three respondents to a CNN/ORC poll said this was the worst functioning Congress they’d seen in their lifetimes. And these dismal views weren’t just the product of subjective impressions – in its first year, the 113th Congress managed to pass only 66 bills, the fewest in the 40 years for which reliable data exists.

But a study published last November in The Journal of Politics suggests that this sorry state of affairs is good news for a small group of Americans at the top of the economic pile. “Washington gridlock helps the super-rich stay rich, and get richer,” says Thomas Volscho, a sociologist at the City University of New York and one of the authors of the study. “And the richer they get, the more the gridlock actually helps them.”

The researchers looked back over 70 years of data, and found that the more dysfunctional Washington is, the bigger the share of the pie the top one percent tends to grab. And most importantly, they also found that when economic inequality is high, the kind of polarization and gridlock that have been the hallmark of Washington since Barack Obama’s election make legislative efforts to change course all-but-impossible.

The study’s authors looked at how three variables influenced the share of the nation’s income grabbed by the top one percent of households between 1940 and 2006. First, they considered how much gridlock existed in the Senate. Then, they studied the distance in political preferences between the president and the House and Senate. And then they looked at how much each Congress got done.

[Octafish]

1. 'What we don't know, can't hurt Them' is how Jeff Wells puts it.

Thank you for adding some poltical science to support what DUers have written since 2000, xchrom.

[xchrom]

2. ...

[ashling]

3. A paper I used for my graduate thesis on inequality

used a dance metaphor. Inequality and Polarization do a little dance . . . they always dance together.
I'll have to look that up.

[guyfromla]

11. So true

Polarization works very well for the very wealthy. Why do you think they donate so many hundreds of millions of dollars to the campaign and fights to spend unlimited amount thru the SCOTUS Inc? America saw the same kind of polarization during 30s when Republicans took the reins of the country from Progressives. It was chaos and led to The Great Depression. But was it The Great Depression for the very wealthy? Hell No...Their wealth increased manifold during the worst economic times of the this nation.

[ashling]

12. My paper was titled

Gilded Again: Extreme Economic Inequality in Our Time

[valerief]

4. File that in the "You Don't Say" drawer. nt

[Octafish]

5. A Third Way Kick for that explains a lot kick.

Too many oustandng OPs don't get the attention they deserve kick kick, too.

[Burf-_-]

6. The only thing

....that will ever counter this gridlock is hardline truth and exposure of this kind of wealth hypocrisy. These people are responsible for economically dooming 99% of the population to WAGE slavery. Pathetic wages !!The one thing these fools consider is how often this cycle repeats itself in history. The real objective is complete and total domination of the working class enough so that any wage payed is offset by dozens of taxes and fee's that end up in the coffers of the wealthy who own every one of us with a shitty paying job. There is no freedom,or liberty until this kind of shit is forever checked.

[debunkthis]

7. I suspect

this was the intent...

[ut oh]

8. oh big surprize there....

not....

[polynomial]

9. One thing is for certain

There are many good Republicans out there, so my views are not always pointed at every Republican. The same is with the Democratic political persons, many good Democratic people are out there they just seem easier to find, besides at least in today’s rhetoric they want to help the middle class person.

A very striking comment was made on the local radio program considered liberal in Chicago WCPT 820 Am radio. Ed Shultz has a program around the same time as Limbaugh, for me changing the channel frequently is fun to hear the political arguments. A comment from Allen Grayson seems extraordinary if it is true. According to Grayson “half of the modern work force in America makes around eleven dollars an hour”. Yikes that only equates to four hundred and forty at a forty hour week before taxes.

I was totally saddened and disappointed but interesting to even think a Representative has the courage in our Congress to express that figure. It is so near unemployment levels to be embarrassing that the Governance and business environment is extremely deficient in a simple cultural sustenance way. To know an offered wage is nothing more than an unemployment level wage. Knowing very well unemployment is not too much more or about the same as a weekly help while trying to find a job.

In the first place it’s actually a disgrace to admit a business in the community that cannot offer a living wage. It likely will be the new millennium philosophy to enter into business will mean several things one important is to participate in the tax system, besides giving a minimum wage to live on. The big plus will be intellectual skills that are inanimate built in products over the decades really shows up now in our stock market greed.

This is exampled in the manufacturing sector that has raped the intellectual support and equity performed through the decades. As example the other day Boeing was accused of holding Washington State employee’s hostage because they wanted to move after decades of work and skills development just to leave and place the working class on their own to go make profits somewhere else. There is a certain amount of intellectual integrity development at all manufacturing business here in America.

Especially with the combined effort of the line worker that must continuously perform better and better. Or, especially displayed by Romney in his sale of that manufacturing plant in Illinois is the Republican icon of the times that totally gave away serious patents to China for profit.

Besides adding to the accomplishments of advances in engineering that benefits just the stock holders employees’ on the line in pits the sweat the rigor, the repetition endured to achieve that statistical goal that determines a patent a company keeps forever is totally disrespected in regards to the line personal the factory floor repair person, the inspector, the supply even the janitor…

Yes all those people aided in getting many successful important progressive mainstream advances in technology via colligating that extremely difficult metadata need to justify a patent. Then because of need in greed just moves away with no compensation in the same order as the stock holder or board of directors or CEO or most of all that banking industry gets because of the success.

Now America has a Congress secretly colligating metadata likely by very special patents built by local factory floor people, those very people that helped build the patent Booze Allen and Hamilton use and likely have in there algorithm to spy on We the People. Sound insane you bet it is, but there is a way out…called vote.

[bossy22]

10. its not greed that caused this but outsourcing

and the globalization of our economy. The factory worker in washington is now competing with the factory worker in Bangladesh. Outsourcing became a corporate necessity- once a company got an edge by lowering its labor costs it had an advantage over its competition. The competition then responded by doing the same thing. Sadly it's a race to the bottom but is really the only rational decision that a company can make. While it varies among industries, protection of profit margins is a top priority. While you might call this greed, I call it natural self-preservation. All companies in order to survive and grow in the long term need to make a profit- its just a law of economics. While you might hear profit and envision fat old white men in business suits swimming in pools of cash sipping whiskey, the truth is much more complicated. Profits fund R&D, they fund expansion, they encourage investors to invest in the company. It's how they survive. Even non-profits adhere to this- they just call it "net operating income". Non-profits need to show net income to get people to donate (people are more likely to donate to a financially stable charity than a questionable one), they need it make expand and further help their mission. A company that has a relatively low profit margin compared to its peers in the long run is unlikely to survive.

The only thing that will help the american middle class is for the standard of living to rise world-wide.

[brentspeak]

14. It's greed which has caused the outsourcing

Your assertion is completely backwards.

Wal-Mart, for example, has strong-armed companies to relocate their US-based manufacturing facilities overseas to China or elsewhere -- or else, Wal-Mart will not stock their products. Is Wal-Mart having a problem "surviving"?

"Profits fund R&D, they fund expansion, they encourage investors to invest in the company."

Yes, profits may fund R&D -- R&D which has increasingly been outsourced out of the US.

[DefenseLawyer]

13. The system is rigged overwhelmingly in their favor

There is very little the Congress could do to make things much better for them. So it stands to reason that they benefit from a Congress that does nothing. For the super rich, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.