So--there's this proposal in Iran that's not very controversial. 71% of the general public support it, with wide agreement among different age and racial groups. There are two political parties. Supporters of one political party favor the policy 91% -9%, and supporters of the other political party are split down the middle (50% in favor, 48% opposed). Since the Iranian government refuses to implement this policy, would you call Iran a democracy?
This doesn't describe Iran, of course; it describes the United States and the incredible, widespread public support for increasing the minimum wage. If a rational person would argue that Iran is not a democracy if it disregarded popular opinion so blithely, why should that not be true of America? How would you not conclude that the American government does not serve its people, but rather its corporate overlords? Remember, the Democrats--whose supporters favor a minimum wage hike 91% to 9%--controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress from 2009 to 2011 and had a fillibuster-proof majority for most of 2009. Granted, there were other important legislative priorities, like health care reform (though that, too, was a shameless corporate sellout), but when the Democrats were one vote shy of 60 in the Senate, how could they not find one single moderate Senator in a party where 50% of voters support increasing the minimum wage? It's almost like they weren't even trying. And, it's interesting that a minimum wage hike would require breaking a Senate filibuster but the Wall Street bailout didn't.
(for the record, here is my post arguing against the minimum wage)
I started writing this blog when I realized I was having the wrong debates. I thought there was some uncertainty over the best way to fight poverty without sacrificing economic growth or job creation; there isn't. The reason we don't fight poverty is not because we don't know how, but because our political system doesn't want to. The bifurcation of the middle class into the sort-of-wealthy and working poor doesn't have to happen either; there's no controversy over how to prevent that from happening, either.
However, there is significant controversy over our policy goals. This controversy is usually unspoken; not even Republican Ayn Rand disciples would have the nerve to say that they want people to remain poor, even though that is exactly what they want. Our government usually gets the policy outcome it desires, even if that policy goal is unspoken. Poverty remains high because our government does not desire poverty reduction.
Our political system only values the interests of the rich, often at the expense of everyone else. Political science data bear this out:
Gilens has been collecting the results of nearly 2,000 survey questions reaching back to the 1980s, looking for evidence that when opinions change, so too does policy. And he found it--but only for the rich. "Most policy changes with majority support didn’t become law," Hacker and Pierson write. The exception was "when they were supported by those at the top. When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence: If 90 percent of poor Americans supported a policy change, it was no more likely to happen than if 10 percent did. By contrast, when more of the well-off supported a change, it was substantially more likely to happen.Unfortunately, Gilens' data only allowed him to divide Americans by decile; he was not able to resolve the top 10% to see the opinions of just the top 1%. More data, about Congressional representatives:
