We all know Lincoln's famous words about America's government being "of the people, by the people, for a tiny subsection of the richest of the richest of the rich among those people." All right, so Lincoln had a more inclusive vision of how Washington works than that. But according to a new research paper from Princeton and Northwestern professors that will be published in Perspectives on Politics, the government really does cater to the nation's wealthiest.
To arrive at that conclusion, the researchers analyzed nearly 1,800 federal policies enacted between 1981 and 2002, comparing the effect of those policies to public interest polls. After breaking down the public's views by income level, the two determined that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy." As for everyone else? "[A]verage citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
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