This item by TDS Contributor and Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow and managing editor Lee Drutman is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
In today’s Washington Post, David A. Fahrentold marvels at what he calls the “Line Items That Won’t Die” – federal programs that benefit narrow interests, but somehow manage to keep getting funded: “One spends federal money to store cotton bales. Another offers scholars a chance to study Asian-American relations. Two others pay to market U.S. oranges in Asia and clean up abandoned coal mines.”
Fahrenthold attributes their success to having Congressional champions. The study of Asian-American relations, for example, takes place at a Honolulu nonprofit called the East-West Center, and enjoys the support of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who also happens to be chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
But there’s also a broader story: the simple fact that when a government program benefits a narrow constituency, it’s very easy for that constituency to organize and make demands on legislators about why this program is worth keeping. The larger public, meanwhile is rarely aware, and even if it were aware, is unlikely to do anything.
Take the Market Access Program discussed in the article, which helps promote U.S. agricultural products abroad. A coalition of agricultural interests benefit greatly from this, and they are organized to advocate fiercely for its continuance and threaten to punish any Senator or Congressman who would vote against the program by withdrawing votes and campaign contributions. Nobody in the general public, however, is likely to care about or vote based solely on this single issue.
This is the difference in what congressional scholar R. Douglas Arnold has called “attentive publics” and “inattentive publics.” Attentive publics are the small groups that care deeply about particular policies, and as a result, are likely to be more influential because they care so intensely about that one issue. Inattentive publics are everyone else. The public might be outraged after reading about the Market Access Program, but the likelihood of most people following up are small. Think of it this way: If 1,000 people want money from you, but only one bothers to keep calling you up telling you why he’s so deserving and threatens to punch you in the face if you don’t give him the money, you’re probably going to give that one person money, especially if it’s likely the other 999 will not even notice or if they do, won’t remember.
Another way to think about it (borrowing from James Q. Wilson) is in terms of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. The benefits of a program that pays peanut and cotton farmers to store their bales and bushels in warehouses are solidly concentrated among peanut and cotton farmers. The costs are distributed to everybody else. But the cost per taxpayer is so small that it’s hard to imagine any group getting organized to fight this particular program. Whereas the farmers – well, they’re damn certain to do fight any cuts to the program. What results is what Wilson calls “client politics” – where small narrow interests work with the relevant congressional committee and executive agency staff to build a usually impenetrable consensus around the importance of a single program.
The challenge for governing is that the federal budget and tax code and regulatory apparatus are filled with thousands upon thousands of these programs, each protected by a small consensus, and without any public coverage. One only need to scroll through the Federal Register to see all the small issues that could potentially benefit small attentive publics at the expense of everyone else. Or better yet, look through the tax code to find all the little credits and deductions for very narrow benefits. It’s enough to make your head spin round and round and round. Jonathan Rauch has pessimistically called this condition “Government’s End.”
I don’t really have a solution. In part, this is the nature of our current system of government and the size and complexity of our economy. But the point is, these programs are very difficult to kill, and Fahrenthold’s story is just the tip of the iceberg.

Old-timers probably remember when there was a robust ongoing debate on the Left and Center-Left about the word “progressive” as an ideological identifier. Was it a good replacement for “liberal,” which had been made toxic by billions of dollars worth of conservative demonization? Was it the property of serious Leftists, who had used to define themselves in opposition to conventional liberals (not to mention moderates and conservatives) in the Democratic Party for decades? Or did it connote the historical traditional that went back to the Brandeis-Croley debates of the early twentieth century, when self-described “progressives” could be found in and beyond both major parties?
This all remained inside baseball until Glenn Beck began developing his convoluted conspiracy theories for a rapidly expanding audience a couple of years ago, and made “progressivism” a lurid term for a quasi-satanic and quasi-totalitarian cabal going back to Woodrow Wilson, that was complicit in both communism and fascism and entirely inimical to American constitutional traditions.
Beck’s audience is now rapidly shrinking, but he’s still able to start a fight, and did so this week (as noted by Salon‘s Alex Pareene) on his radio show by applying the “P-Word” to none other than his old Fox buddy Mike Huckabee.

Nearly all of what Beck says about Huckabee is pretty ludicrous (aside from such stupid slurs as calling the Rev. Jim Wallis a “Marxist”). But the interesting thing is that Huck fired back in an unusually uninhibited way on his own blog:

This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a “cancer” and a “Nazi.” What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews? I had the audacity–not of hope–but the audacity to give respect to the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity. I’m no fan of her husband’s policies for sure, but I have appreciated her efforts that Beck misrepresented–either out of ignorance or out of a deliberate attempt to distort them to create yet another “boogey man” hiding in the closet that he and only he can see.

Wow. Them’s fightin’ words. It’s unclear whether they mean that Beck is now marginal enough that even Christian Right pols can take a swing at him, or that Huck’s really not going to run for president in 2012. But you can bet it wouldn’t have happened a year ago.

Having first declared that the 2012 Iowa Caucuses had become a “global wingnut magnet” with the arrival on the campaign trail of Judge Roy Moore, I’ve now got a more measured assessment, which I’ve written up for The Atlantic.
You can read it all, but the basic theory is that the Christian Right is holding something of a Caucus-Within-the-Caucuses to determine which of their champions will carry the cross into the main battle with “moderate” infidels like Mitt Romney. It’s sort of what happened in 2008 when Mike Huckabee became the Iowa alternative to Romney among Christian conservatives only after he out-organized Sen. Sam Brownback at the state party straw poll in the summer of 2007.
So Republicans who are hoping that the freak show of far-right candidates crowding Iowa will give more oxygen to “moderates” may be missing the point. Within the context of the Christian Right, Roy Moore is not a madman, but just, well, a rather passionate man of distinctive Dominionist views. He’ll get his audition, along with Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum and maybe T-Paw (if he keeps evolving in the radical direction he seems to have chosen) for the Christian Right nod, but The Faithful will probably go into the Caucuses themselves more or less united.
There’s one other thing that strikes me as fascinating about Moore’s invasion of Iowa. His political act in Alabama has pretty much worn itself out after two very poor showings in GOP gubernatorial primaries. It could very well be that the Judge feels more at “home” in Iowa, one of the few places in the country where conservatives are obsessed with the issue of same-sex marriage. He wouldn’t be the first Alabama demagogue to find a surprisingly receptive audience Up North, would he?

Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:

On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.

First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.

Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?

Read more…

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
During the 2008 election cycle, Mitt Romney was often accused of treating politics more like a consumer-focused business than an exercise in leadership. “My view is, we ought to double Guantanamo,” he said, radiating the sense that if primary voters wanted something, anything, he’d be willing to sell it. His strategists obsessed about creating and selling “Brand Romney.” To many, these efforts made him look like a crass twit, a market researcher’s caricature of the perfect Republican candidate, even as he came in second-place for the GOP nomination. This election, however, Romney may have to compete with Donald Trump.
Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star, has been putting out the types of feelers that usually signal a real candidacy rather than a publicity stunt. He is riding high in the polls on essentially the same customer-service-style political strategy that fellow entrepreneur Mitt Romney pursued, but a la Trump, stronger, bigger, crasser–and in a far more radical political environment, where the demand for an ultra-hard line on terrorism has been eclipsed by the niche demand for Birtherism, along with extreme policy positions that voters weren’t even obsessing about yet like virulent anti-Chinese protectionism and a policy to openly steal the Arab world’s oil. The Republican establishment has perceived this as a threat–believing that Trump will drag the entire Republican field into a world where they cannot be taken seriously by general election voters–and launched an all-out effort to tar him. But the truth is that their effort may be a lost cause, for reasons that are intrinsic to the success of Trump’s consumer-focused approach: This year, GOP voters’ hunger for radicalism is so great that it can be filled by essentially anybody. Kill off Trump’s candidacy and the demand will remain, leaving an opening for yet another demagogic charlatan to take his place.
Trump first raised eyebrows in the Republican establishment by taking steps that a serious candidate would take before running for president–planning trips to Iowa, chatting up potential staff, sitting down for an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody. Then, last Friday, Public Policy Polling released a survey that showed Trump not only running ahead of the entire 2012 field, but registering numbers higher than such prior leaders as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. That caused the Republican Powers That Be to stop dismissing him and launch the kind of sustained attack that is said to have succeeded in fatally damaging Sarah Palin’s credibility as a potential presidential candidate. During the last few days Karl Rove, George Will, and the Club for Growth have all trashed Trump very aggressively.
But a closer look at the PPP findings should reveal the weakness of this elite strategy. What they show is not a desire to support the faux tycoon per se, but a raging right-wing, anti-establishment fever that has only gotten stronger in recent months. Ending or mortally wounding a Trump candidacy would only address its symptoms, rather than curing a condition in which voters will follow whichever candidate is willing to outdo his or her opponents at wingnuttery. According to PPP, fully 23 percent of self-identified Republicans say they could not vote for any candidates who “who firmly stated they believed Barack Obama was born in the United States.” Another 39 percent weren’t sure they could vote for such Birther-defying candidates. The pollster didn’t test some of the other provocative positions associated with Trump, such as his stance on China or desire to despoil the Arab world of its oil, but I have a strong feeling those sentiments would perform pretty well, too. There may be no coherent body of views you could call “Trumpism,” but even without Trump, there would be a hunger for spicier red meat than is being offered by the current crop of Republican candidates.
This screw-the-establishment sentiment must be understood in the context of what looks to be growing dissatisfaction with compromises made by Republicans in the Tea Party Congress and statehouses. The House Republican leadership has been congratulating itself for “winning” the recent appropriations fight without shutting down the government, and without triggering an outright revolt among the House freshmen. But that’s not going over well in activist land. This previous Tax Day weekend saw a slew of protests against the latest establishment sell-out: In a nice act of revenge against her Beltway detractors, Sarah Palin regaled a Wisconsin audience with a fiery attack on Congressional Republican gutlessness, taunting them that they need to learn to “fight like a girl.” And conservative pressure to go to the mats over a debt limit increase is rising rapidly each day, particularly if the alternative is some sort of budget deal with Democrats that leaves tax increases on the table while removing the kind of radical attack on domestic spending advanced by Paul Ryan’s budget.
This dynamic creates an enormous temptation for non-congressional Republicans to join the revolt, as evidenced by the rapid devolution of Tim Pawlenty into an extremist on budget issues and a favorite at Tea Party rallies. (He’s now opposed to raising the debt ceiling, even though that would damage the U.S. economy on a scale similar to a nuclear attack.) And if there is something that GOP voters want which Pawlenty is unwilling to give them because he decides it’s too crazy, then there will always be Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, who are receiving rapturous receptions on the campaign trail, to flay him for his equivocation.
If Trump is pushed out of the limelight or off the campaign trail by the conservative establishment, or by his own erratic record on a host of issues, the atavistic longings of the rank-and-file conservative base will simply affix themselves elsewhere as other candidates try to tap the rich vein of anger he’s helped galvanize. And if he survives the pounding he’s about to get from respectable opinion, then George Will is right: He will make a “shambles” of every Republican presidential debate. But that’s not only because he’s an eccentric demagogue who is willing to say just about anything for attention. It’s also because he’s exactly what conservative voters crave.

To my great surprise, at the National Review site, former Sen. Fred Thompson responded to my TNR piece (cross-posted here) last week making him the symbol of disappointing, half-hearted dark-horse candidates for president.
Like TNR’s Jonathan Chait, I found Thompson’s response interesting, humorous, and even endearing. He did, unfortunately, interpret an entirely metaphorical reference to “abundant stops for rest and ice cream” much too literally. But if I have repeated inaccurate reporting of his actual comings and goings at the 2007 Iowa State Fair, I apologize. As an attendee of that particular fair (though not the same day as Fred), I am quite sure that he was perceived as violating Fair Mores, even if he actually didn’t, and I wish he had gone to more trouble to set the record straight back then.
He didn’t much deal with the broader issues my article raised, but that’s okay. My main point was to upbraid Republican opinion-leaders for their endless faith in late-entering dark-horse candidates. And Fred Thompson provides a warning vastly more credible and vivid than mine:

So Mr. or Ms. Dark Horse, you have not played by the rules, you late-comer, and your belly fire is suspect. And people will go to great lengths to prove their suspicions correct. Therefore, you must be willing to run over your grandmother, mortgage your soul, and behave like an over-caffeinated Elmer Gantry in order to make up for your insolence. Only then will they be comfortable with the idea of your being president.

Thank you, Senator.

Alan I. Abramowitz and Nate Silver agree that Dems have a good chance to win back a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year, which should be cause for some concern among smarter Republicans. Here’s Abramowitz, from his current column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

Democrats would only need to pick up 25 seats in 2012 to get to the magic number of 218 that would give them control of the House-assuming that all of their members supported the Democratic candidate for Speaker. That’s hardly an insurmountable number. In fact, two of the last three elections, 2006 and 2010, have produced bigger swings, and 2008 came close.
Despite the recent volatility of House elections, some astute political observers are giving the Democrats little or no chance of regaining control of the House in 2012. For example, last December, Republican pollster Glen Bolger went so far as to “guarantee” that the GOP would maintain its House majority even if President Obama were to win a second term. And just last month, respected political handicapper Charlie Cook agreed that a Democratic pickup of 25 or more seats in the House was highly unlikely.
Both Bolger and Cook cited the relatively short coattails that winning presidential incumbents have had in recent years as a major obstacle to big Democratic gains in the 2012 House elections. In the past 40 years, the largest number of House seats gained by the winning incumbent’s party was 16 in 1984, a year in which Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide. You have to go all the way back to 1964 to find an election in which the winning incumbent’s party gained at least 25 seats in the House.
Notwithstanding these predictions and the historical record, however, there are three reasons to believe that Democrats have a decent chance of taking back control of the House in 2012. First, as a result of their big gains in 2010, Republicans will be defending a large number of seats in House districts that voted for Barack Obama in 2008; second, many of those districts are likely to vote for Obama again in 2012 because of the difference between the presidential and midterm electorate in the current era; and third, Republican incumbents in these Obama districts will be at high risk of losing their seats if Obama wins because straight-ticket voting is much more prevalent now than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

Further, adds Abramowitz,

…There are 60 Republicans in districts that were carried by Barack Obama in 2008 including 15 in districts that Obama carried by at least 10 points. In contrast, there are only 12 Democrats in districts that were carried by John McCain in 2008 and only six in districts that McCain carried by at least 10 points.

As for the GOP’s supposed edge in redistricting, Abramowitz notes:

Of course before the 2012 congressional elections take place, House districts will be redrawn based on the results of the 2010 Census. In states where Republicans control redistricting-and the number of such states grew considerably as a result of the 2010 midterm elections-GOP legislatures may be able to redraw the lines to protect potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents. However, the ability of Republican legislatures to protect their party’s House incumbents may be limited by the dramatic increase in the past decade in the nonwhite share of the population in many states. For example, while Republicans will control redistricting in Texas, which is gaining four House seats, more than any other state, most of the population growth in Texas has been because of the rapid increase in the Hispanic population. At least one, if not two, of the new Texas House districts are likely to go to Hispanics.

Abramowitz also cites the increased turnout, over the mid terms, of Obama-friendly constituencies in a presidential election, particularly Latino voters, who are growing even faster than expected, according to the latest census data. But he believes the Dems strongest card may be the rising trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years. Abramowitz stops short of predicting a Dem takeover of the House, but he calls it a “realistic” possibility, especially if Obama wins a “decisive victory” in ’12.
Nate Silver sees the budget fight and the vote on GOP Rep. Ryan’s draconian budget proposals as a potential net plus for Democratic congressional candidates. Silver explains in a recent five thirty eight post,

So far, no polls have been conducted on Mr. Ryan’s budget as a whole. But — although voters will like the deficit reduction it claims to achieve (several outside analysts have questioned the bill’s economic findings) — a couple of its individual elements figure to be quite unpopular. In particular, the bill includes substantial changes to Medicare and Medicaid — changes that many voters tell pollsters are unacceptable. And it would cut the top tax rates, when polls usually find that most Americans want taxes on upper-income Americans to be raised rather than lowered.

Silver also believes that the Republicans’ prospects for a senate takeover next year are overstated. Echoing Abramowitz’s point about the decline in split-ticket voting, he sees the vote on Ryan’s proposals as a potential game-changer for the House:

…One possible consequence of the vote is that it could tie the fate of Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress more closely together. In the past, presidents have rarely had substantial coattails when running for a second term; Bill Clinton’s Democrats won just 9 seats in the House in 1996, for instance, even though he beat Bob Dole overwhelmingly. In 2010, however, the share of the vote received by Democrats running for Congress was very strongly correlated with support for Mr. Obama, and today’s vote could deepen that connection, making it less likely that voters will return a divided government again.

When two of the sharpest political data analysts agree that the House may be up for grabs, the DNC and Dem contributors should take note and invest accordingly. Of course there is a difference between Dems having a decent chance to win back a House majority and the probability of it happening. For the moment, however, The President appears to be moving into solid position to leverage the trend toward straight-ticket voting for the benefit of the Party. With a favorable break or two on the economy, the possibility of a Dem takeover of the House could morph into a good bet.

Just when you thought the 2012 Republican presidential field couldn’t get much zanier, who should appear on the highways and byways of Iowa than Judge Roy Moore!
Yes, we’re talking Roy Moore, Alabama’s famous Ten Commandments Judge, who won brief notoriety by getting himself forcibly ejected from office for insisting on the installation of a large monument to the Decalogue at his courthouse, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Moore was treated as a martyr by theocrats everywhere, but his two subsequent bids for governor of Alabama–most recently last year, when he finished a poor fourth in the GOP primary–didn’t go much of anywhere.
Judge Roy has also been a fixture at Tea Party events, serving as the most visible link between that “movement” and the Christian Right. But resistance to GLBT rights has long been his go-to issue, and that’s what has drawn him to Iowa, where conservative activists are obsessed with an effort to overturn the State Supreme Court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Indeed, Moore’s appearance at an anti-marriage-equality rally in Des Moines last month seems to have led directly to his decision to launch a presidential exploratory committee and stick around Iowa as a putative candidate. He’s being squired around the state by one of the co-chairs of Mike Huckabee’s 2008 Iowa campaign.
If nothing else, Moore’s move should help make Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain seem more moderate by comparison, though you do have to wonder exactly how much oxygen exists for multiple candidates associated with the harder-core elements of the Christian Right. The more conventional Iowa Republicans have to be getting a bit uncomfortable by now at the realization their state party has become a global wingnut magnet.

So Beltway deficit hawks probably enjoyed the little scare thrown into financial markets today by Standard & Poor’s (yes, the folks who completely missed every sign of the financial crisis), which suggested future action to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating if nothing is done soon to achieve a bipartisan deficit reduction plan.
But the warning wasn’t really music to the ears of the supposedly-debt-obsessed Tea Party Movement, whose leaders right now seem to treat as Public Enemy Number One the possibility of a bipartisan budget plan, because they know it would have to include increased revenues.
RedState’s Erick Erickson has declared war on his own senator, Saxby Chambliss, for participating in the Gang of Six negotiations aimed at a Bowles-Simpson modeled deficit reduction package. All over the country, Tax Weekend Tea Party gatherings were focused on intimidating Republican pols into opposing any compromise with Democrats on budget issues.
It’s far past time to understand that conservative activists only care about budget deficits and debts when Democrats are in office, and only favor action on deficits and debts if they involve wrecking the New Deal/Great Society programs, and actually cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
No bipartisan deficit reduction package will ever get the support of today’s conservative movement. It has to be their way or the highway, and their way means repeal of progressive taxes and progressive policies generally.
I hope the mainstream media finally gets that rather important detail straight.

Every now and then a pundit puts her or his finger on an important phenomenon that’s been hiding in plain site. That’s true of E.J. Dionne’s remarkable Washington Post column over the weekend on the “American Ruling Class” and its unprecedented indifference to the fate of the country:

An enlightened ruling class understands that it can get richer and its riches will be more secure if prosperity is broadly shared, if government is investing in productive projects that lift the whole society and if social mobility allows some circulation of the elites. A ruling class closed to new talent doesn’t remain a ruling class for long.
But a funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money.

Dionne goes on to chronicle the declining effective tax rates of the very wealthy, and its connection to one of the most intensive lobbying campaigns in U.S. history, particularly aimed at lowering or eliminating taxation of capital gains and dividends, which is of greatest important to the financial sector:

Listen to David Cay Johnston, the author of “Free Lunch” and a columnist for Tax Notes. “The effective rate for the top 400 taxpayers has gone from 30 cents on the dollar in 1993 to 22 cents at the end of the Clinton years to 16.6 cents under Bush,” he said in a telephone interview. “So their effective rate has gone down more than 40 percent.”
He added: “The overarching drive right now is to push the burden of government, of taxes, down the income ladder.”
And you wonder where the deficit came from.

It’s unlikely that the “ruling class” notices this sort of admonition or cares about it. But it does provide a nice break in the monotonous pandering of conservatives to the very rich as oppressed “job creators” who need to be liberated from taxes and regulations in order to work their magic on behalf of the useless drones who make up the bulk of the U.S. population, who are longing for salvation from John Galt.