Ugh. The worse inequality gets, the more people agree with Republicans [View all]
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/opinion/has-obamacare-turned-voters-against-sharing-the-wealth.html?ref=politics&_r=0
The author of the paper, Matthew Luttig, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, found that while “numerous political theorists suggest that rising inequality and the shift in the distribution of income to those at the top should lead to increasing support for liberal policies,” in practice, “rising inequality in the United States has largely promoted ideological conservatism.”
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I asked two experts, Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, and Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, if Luttig’s conclusions are consistent with their own research, and both said he is on target. Luttig’s conclusions run counter to the view of liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is calling on her fellow Democrats to make tackling inequality a top priority. Heather McGhee, for example, the president of Demos (motto: “an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy”), argues that inequality should be “the defining issue of the American political debate this campaign cycle.”
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Even worse for Democrats, the Saez paper found that “information about inequality also makes respondents trust government less,” decreasing “by nearly twenty percent the share of respondents who ‘trust government’ most of the time:”
Hence, emphasizing the severity of a social or economic problem appears to undercut respondents’ willingness to trust the government to fix it — the existence of the problem could act as evidence of the government’s limited capacity to improve outcomes.
The findings of the Saez group are consistent with Luttig’s. Taken together, they suggest that even if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate in 2016, largely on the basis of favorable demographic trends, the party will confront serious hurdles if it attempts to deliver material support to working men and women and the very poor. Redistribution is in trouble, and that is likely to tie American politics in knots for many years to come.
A very informative, if also depressing, read.
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