Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [70]
The biggest winners here are financial executives. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes, “Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society—from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age—have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.”106 In 2004, “nonfinancial executives of publicly traded companies accounted for less than 6% of the top .01 percent of the income bracket. In that same year, the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500.”107
The next big winners were the top executives from the S&P 500 companies. In the 1970s the executives at the S&P 500 made thirty times what their workers did, and today make three hundred times what their workers make.108 Their average salary was more than $10 million in 2007, about 344 times the pay of “typical American workers.”109 Likewise, as their salaries have skyrocketed, the position of the self-employed has collapsed. Between 1948 and 2003 “the self-employment rate in the United States fell from 18.5% to 7.5%”110—the second-lowest among twenty-two rich nations according to an OECD study.111 The nation of our parents was defined by makers and innovators. We’ve become a nation defined not by the upwardly mobile entrepreneurs, but by Wall Street fat cats—the nation predicted by the apostle Matthew (13:12): “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.”112
So let’s repeat the point in a single line, because it is critical to everything in this book: changes in government policy, Hacker and Pierson argue, account for the radical change in the distribution of American wealth. This isn’t the rich getting richer because they’re smarter or working harder. It is the connected getting richer because their lobbyists are working harder. No political philosophy—liberal, libertarian, or conservative—should be okay with that.
To be fair, this last step in the argument—linking the rich to the connected (by which I mean the funders)—is not a step that Hacker and Pierson explicitly make. Indeed, and surprisingly, they don’t place campaign finance anywhere near the top of their program of reform. And while Gilens clearly references it, he is quite insistent that the work he has done so far cannot establish, at least at the level of confidence that a political scientist requires, exactly why policymakers respond to the rich more clearly than they respond to the poor.
Yet as Gilens acknowledges,
[T]he most obvious source of influence over policy that distinguishes high-income Americans is money and the willingness to donate to parties, candidates, and interest organizations…. Since not only the propensity to donate but also the size of donations increases with income level, this figure understates—probably to a very large degree—the extent to which political donations come from the most affluent Americans.113
Senator Bob Dole (R-Kans.; 1969–1996) puts the point more directly: “Poor people don’t make campaign contributions.”114
The question we must ask as citizens, not political scientists, is what we will make of the data we’ve gotten so far. It is clear that government bends in the direction that the funders prefer, and against—often, but not always—the people. It is plausible, more likely than not, that this differential bending is because of the influence of this funding. If you considered the matter in the way the Framers did, accounting for the structural and predictable ways in which dependency might express itself, it is almost irresistible, from their perspective, that Congress betray a competing dependency “on the funders”—competing, that is, with a dependency “on the People alone.” The Framers were proud that they had ensured a two-year cycle of punishment and reward for the House. Yet the cycle of punishment and reward for funders is every day, not every two years. For two or three