Richest among us DO WELL with Gridlock and a Do Nothing Congress.

There is big money for a few in doing NOTHING in Congress.

The researchers looked back over 70 years of data, and found that the more dysfunctional Washington is, the bigger the share of the pie the top one percent tends to grab. And most importantly, they also found that when economic inequality is high, the kind of polarization and gridlock that have been the hallmark of Washington since Barack Obama’s election make legislative efforts to change course all-but-impossible.

The study’s authors looked at how three variables influenced the share of the nation’s income grabbed by the top one percent of households between 1940 and 2006. First, they considered how much gridlock existed in the Senate. Then, they studied the distance in political preferences between the president and the House and Senate. And then they looked at how much each Congress got done.

Their findings suggests that Congress, and especially the Senate — where a minority can gum up the works– has a strong bias toward maintaining the status quo, and when there’s already a lot of inequality, a self-reinforcing cycle emerges. Volscho explained to Moyers & Company that, ”in the United States, the institutional design of the government was designed to be inherently conservative – to make it hard to get things done. Inequality is self-reinforcing, so as the rich become richer, Congress’s inability to pass legislation that could change that situation gets worse.”

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/01/study-polarization-and-gridlock-work-well