From “the wealthy are different from you and me” files: more data
by digby
I’ve written frequently about this Demos study that shows the rich are different from you and me. Here’s more evidence from yet another study this time by Professors Benjamin I. Page and Larry M. Bartels:
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.
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%) 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.
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 healthcare be cut to balance the budget. Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.
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.
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.
They speculate that the differences in concerns might come from the fact that the wealthy act out of self-interest or that they might know better than the rest of us plebes what constitutes the “common good.” They point out that the constant drumbeat about deficits over the past couple of years may have educated the country to understand that cutting their own throats is actually good for them.
Let’s just say I think that the first possibility is the more likely since austerity is being shown as a destructive policy everywhere it’s been tried. Well, destructive for everyone but the wealthy who seem to be making out just fine.
These two rightly refuse to come to any conclusions without more empirical study:
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?
I am not constrained by the need for more data since I am just an average person who relies on my own two eyes and ears — and years of experience studying human nature — and I feel quite confident that the wealthy exercises tremendous clout in our political culture, that they live in a different world from the rest of us and therefore many of them have views on politics which are skewed to their self-interest and that the policies we see coming out of Washington quite obviously reflect this. I can also see that this is not democracy in any recognizable form. But that’s just me.
H/t to Dave Johnson who has much more on this here.
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