Via Atrios, Chris Hayes has a good piece on how/why Washington elites simply don’t care about jobs for middle-class Americans:
There were already Two Americas before the Great Recession, but in the wake of that seismic disruption, those two continents have only moved further apart.
This manifests itself in our politics in two ways. For one, it just so happens that policy-makers, pundits and politicians are drawn from the classes that are in recovery, and they live in an area where new sushi restaurants are opening all the time. For even the best-intentioned and most conscientious staffers and aides this has, I think, a subconscious effect.
[….]The other problem is that our system is responsive only to voices at the top of the social pyramid—the bankers and businessmen who are raking in record bonuses and the professional upper middle class, which is recovering much faster than the nation as a whole. In a 2007 paper titled “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness in the United States,” Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens analyzed 2,000 survey questions from 1981 to 2002, looking for the relationship between public opinion and policy outcomes. He found that “when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans.”
The change here has to come from the bottom up. As long as the top one percent can convince one half of the middle-class to focus its rage on the other half of the middle class, our elected officials have little incentive to respond to actual middle-class economic concerns.
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