If the ignorance of the American voter about the mechanics of our political system did not produce such toxic and disastrous consequences, it might be as laughable as late-night talk shows suggest. In this campaign season, the mass media is awash in language identifying “voter anger”, “disillusion”, “being fed up” and “burned out” with “those politicians.” This is exactly equivalent to blaming Pinocchio for the deeds of Gepetto.
Let’s begin with the stark conclusions of an excellent book: Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back On the Middle Class, (2010) written by two young economists, Jacob S. Hacker, the Director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a cum laude graduate of Harvard with a Phd from Yale and Paul Pierson, holder of the John Gross Endowed Chair of Political Science (and he holds/held the Avice Saint Chair of Public Policy) at the University of California. Their book was an exhaustive study of the growing economic divide between the 1/10 of 1% of our nation’s wealthiest men and women, and everyone else. After examining every conceivable option---inequities of education, globalization, labor policies , imports and exports, etc. ad nauseum, the authors finally arrived at a clear and incontrovertible cause.