Welcome to Income Inequality Kos.
Join us Thursdays, at 9:00 p.m. eastern. We discuss income inequality, concentration of wealth, and related issues.
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Community Statement
The shared community value is a belief that income inequality is a political issue of high importance. Otherwise, all takes on the issue, from within the general Daily Kos community, are welcome.
Political polarization in America is at a historic extreme. It has been steadily rising since the election of Ronald Reagan.
Concentration of wealth in America is at a historic extreme. It has been steadily rising since the election of Ronald Reagan.
Political polarization and concentration of wealth are strongly correlated. Concentration of wealth is more cause, and political polarization is more result.
No one should expect political divisiveness and political ugliness to be reduced in America, until concentration of wealth is addressed.
Here is a graph of votes in the 111th Senate. Note that the parties are tightly clustered, well divided, and that Democrats are more tightly clustered than Republicans.
The graph is from Senate DW-NOMINATE Scores, 111th Congress. You can visit there to get a better view, and rollovers of the Senator names.
The horizontal axis approximately represents "government intervention in the economy":
As Poole and Rosenthal explain in Ideology & Congress (the 2nd edition of
Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting), the first dimension can be interpreted in most periods as government intervention in the economy or liberal-conservative in the modern era. The 2nd dimension picks up the conflict between
North and South on Slavery before the Civil War and from the late 1930s through the mid-1970s, civil rights for African-Americans. After 1980 there is considerable evidence that the South realigns and the 2nd dimension is no longer important.
DW-NOMINATE Scores With Bootstrapped Standard Errors
Here is another view of the current extreme polarization:
The extreme partisan divide is not inevitable. It used not to be so strong.
From the New Deal, through the election of Ronald Reagan, votes were more alike than different. We had a more unified vision of government.
The extreme divide will not be fixed by style or personality of political leaders. George W. Bush, relentlessly divisive in rhetoric, and Barack Obama, intentionally more bipartisan, are at their proper points in the graph.
The divide is systematic, and is not a matter of style or tactics. To repair the torn-apart wound, we must attend to the thing that rips us apart, we must address the cause.
The steady rise in political polarization, since Ronald Reagan, corresponds to the steady rise in concentration of wealth, since Ronald Reagan.
The long decades of more moderate concentration of wealth following the New Deal and World War II, correspond to the long decades of greater partisan unity.
This makes intuitive sense. People less divided by wealth have less need of strong party distinctions.
Democrats represent about 99.5% of us. Republicans represent about 0.5%.
Democrats represent everyone, with a mild progressiveness. Republicans represent only the few very richest, with a harsh and steep regressiveness.
By rights, Democrats should stomp Republicans in elections. They should win by more than 99 to 1.
Money is power. Concentrated money is concentrated power.
Concentrated power to buy powerful concentrated television ads to prevent Democrats from stomping Republicans in elections, for example.
The extreme political divide will not be brought back down until the extreme concentration of wealth is brought back down. The solutions to extreme concentration of wealth are well known: they are traditional Democratic policy. The policy must be enacted across a broad front. Job growth, progressive taxation, inheritance taxation, business and financial and environmental regulation, worker protection, disencouragement of speculation, elimination of discriminatory barriers, public infrastructure and programs: the plain old Democratic agenda.
The standard for success is not really arbitrary. The policy is successful when concentration of wealth is brought back down.
Once concentration of wealth is brought back down, the divisive political bickering will stop. But not until. The graphs show that nothing else should be expected.
Sources
The polarization graph is from McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, Polarized America Page.
The concentration of wealth graph is from Saez, Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States.
The graph of income growth under Democrats and Republicans is from Bartels, Partisan Politics and the U.S. Income Distribution.