Smothered > The Out-Sized Influence of Big Money On Politics

As if we don't know it already, a well-researched and documented report was published today in TruthOut  

When Money Talks, Citizens’ Voices Get Drowned Out

By Rajan Menon, writing in TomDispatch

Over the last four decades, economic disparities in the U.S. increased substantially and are now greater than those in other wealthy democracies.

Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness offered in basic civics textbooks — we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics — no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them believe that the economy and political system are both rigged. They also think that money has an outsized influence on politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80% of Republicans. And careful studies confirm what the public believes.

None of this should be surprising given the stark economic inequality that now marks our society. . .
The political consequence has been that a tiny minority of extremely wealthy Americans wields disproportionate influence, leaving so many others feeling disempowered. . . Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support stricter laws to prevent wealth from hijacking politics and want the Citizens United ruling overturned. But then just how much does the voice of the majority matter? Judging from the many failed efforts to pass such laws, not much.

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A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality   

UPDATED

December 11, 2018

BY Chad Stone, Danilo Trisi, Arloc Sherman, and Roderick Taylor

 

You can find it here > https://www.cbpp.org/research

The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized:

• The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity.
  
  • Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly doubling in inflation-adjusted terms between the late 1940s and early 1970s.
  • The income gap between those high up the income ladder and those on the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period.
• Beginning in the 1970s, economic growth slowed and the income gap widened.
  • Income growth for households in the middle and lower parts of the distribution slowed sharply, while incomes at the top continued to grow strongly.
  • The concentration of income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen 90 years ago (during the “Roaring Twenties”).
• Wealth — the value of a household’s property and financial assets, minus the value of its debts — is much more highly concentrated than income. The best survey data show that the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent rose from just under 30 percent in 1989 to nearly 39 percent in 2016, while the share held by the bottom 90 percent fell from just over 33 percent to less than 23 percent over the same period

Data from a variety of sources contribute to this broad picture of strong growth and shared prosperity for the early postwar period, followed by slower growth and growing inequality since the 1970s. Within these broad trends, however, different data tell slightly different parts of the story (and no single source of data is better for all purposes than the others).
This guide consists of four sections.
The first describes the commonly used sources and statistics on income and discusses their relative strengths and limitations in understanding trends in income and inequality.
The second provides an overview of the trends revealed in those key data sources.
The third and fourth sections supply additional information on wealth, which complements the income data as a measure of how the most well-off Americans are doing, and poverty, which measures how the least well-off Americans are doing.

I. The Census Survey and IRS Income Data

The most widely used sources of data and statistics on household income and its distribution are the annual survey of households conducted as part of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Statistics of Income (SOI) data compiled from a large sample of individual income tax returns. The Census Bureau publishes annual reports on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States based on the CPS data,^[2] and the IRS publishes an annual report on individual income tax returns based on the SOI.^[3] While the Federal Reserve also collects income data in its triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF),^[4] the SCF is more valuable as the best source of survey data on wealth.
Each agency produces its own tables and statistics and makes a public-use file of the underlying data available to other researchers. In addition, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has developed a model that combines CPS and SOI data to estimate household income both before and after taxes, as well as average taxes paid by income group back to 1979.^[5] Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have used SOI data to construct estimates of the concentration of income at the top of the distribution back to 1913.^[6] More recently, they have expanded that work to examine trends in wealth concentration and to incorporate the portion of national income not captured in the tax or survey data into the analysis of income inequality.^[7] CBO and Piketty-Saez regularly release reports incorporating the latest available data.