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> The part about money not being able to influence politics does not ring true to me. Yeah, it's true that you can't outright buy an election wholesale. But ri
by byuu 12y ago
> The part about money not being able to influence politics does not ring true to me.
Yeah, it's true that you can't outright buy an election wholesale. But rich people are rich for a reason: they don't just throw their money away on things that have zero results. They spend so much on elections because it has real results. Maybe it sways a race by 4%. But if the race is decided by 2%, then that's enough to win instead of lose. Plus, some of that money goes to campaigning, some goes to decide which candidates are able to afford to run in the first place, some goes to lobbyists, some of it goes directly to congressmen in return for favors, etc.
- wpietri 12y agoYou may be interested in this: "In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents." "Economic Inequality and Political Representation", Dr. Larry Bartels, Princeton https://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/economic.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/economic.pdf