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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
