In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors.
Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy”.
Seven years later, America is witnessing a very public and explicit illustration of this situation in real time – and the country seems pretty ticked off about it, in the lead-up to Tuesday’s off-year elections and in advance of the upcoming midterms next year.
Over the last few weeks, Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers have been making headlines agreeing to whittle down their social spending reconciliation bill at the demand of corporate donors and their congressional puppets.
The specific initiatives being cut or watered down in the Biden agenda bill share two traits: 1) They would require the wealthy and powerful to sacrifice a bit of their wealth and power and 2) They are quite literally the most popular proposals among rank-and-file voters.
New polling demonstrates the silencing effect that systemic corruption is having on voter preferences:
82% of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare – and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72% saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill. On Tuesday, Democrats announced they had reached a deal on a drug pricing plan, which Politico described as “far weaker” than Democrats’ promised legislation. One industry analyst said the deal “seems designed to let legislators claim an achievement while granting pharma protection”.
The poll also found that 70% of voters support including paid family and medical leave for new parents in Democrats’ spending bill. Manchin has demanded this item be cut.
After railing against the Republicans’ 2017 tax law for years, Democrats have largely refused to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and their final bill may even end up being a net tax cut for the rich. This, even though Biden’s own pollsters found that raising taxing on the wealthy was “the most popular of more than 30 economic proposals” they tested during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The flip side of all this also appears to be true – Democrats have protected initiatives to enrich powerful corporations, even though some of those measures aren’t very popular. One example: subsidies for health insurance plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace that shower money on for-profit insurers. Morning Consult reports that extending new ACA premium tax credits passed by Democrats in March “is the lowest-ranking of all the health measures included in the poll”.
The results of this latest middle finger to voter preferences? New polling data shows that almost three-quarters of Americans now think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Taken together, this is the democracy crisis thrumming underneath all the media noise – the day-to-day erosion of democracy by corporations that use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which then erodes Americans’ faith in their government. And yet this erosion does not get discussed in a media-directed democracy discourse that focuses almost exclusively on the 6 January insurrection or Republican efforts to deny election results and limit voting.
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What Americans want
What Americans want
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: What Americans want
This is news to you?
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.
Re: What Americans want
In other news:
The sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
The sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.
yrs,
rubato
Re: What Americans want
I'm sure it would be to many Americans, and the Guardian.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: What Americans want
DUH! That took research?
A friend of Doc's, one of only two B-29 bombers still flying.
