My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Fed up with crony capitalism and losing economic ground?

This was a rallying point of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party for a while, somewhere amid the anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric. The Occupy Wall Street movement had a similar populist message — “We are the 99 percent” — and it resonated with many in the Democratic Party.

If these diverse groups started voting together based on their economic interests, there could be a cataclysmic shift in Washington comparable to the one about 100 years ago.

The Republican and Democratic parties both had insurgent Progressive wings in the early 1900s, led by Robert La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt (later in his presidency) and Woodrow Wilson, among others. They shook up the old guard in Washington and generated support to pass tariff reform, stricter child labor laws, campaign finance regulation, stronger anti-trust legislation, the federal reserve banking system, popular election of senators and a graduated income tax.

The wealth divide and the extent that big donors influence politics now is similar to a century ago — suffocatingly large. Most politicians today, in either party, cater to Wall Street and appease big donors in order to stay in office. Consider this: Candidates for major office are expected to spend 30 to 70 percent of their time asking people for money.

How much does the necessity of soliciting huge bucks for campaign coffers shrink the pool of qualified people willing to run for higher office? And once they win, how well can they realistically serve the people when they are beholden to so few and they have to continue spending half their time raising another pile of cash for their next re-election bid?

You know the answers. We have the best Congress money can buy, and it’s barely functional (to be kind). Judging by Congress’ average approval rating of 15 percent in 2014 (it was usually in the 30s and 40s prior to 2010), people have little confidence in Congress anymore. And there is no reason they should when the will of the public is rarely followed unless it aligns with the wishes of the economic elite and organized interests.

One example of this is that an overwhelming majority of people favor background checks prior to all gun sales. Even 86 percent of Republicans favor universal background checks and don’t equate it with gun control. Yet it gains no traction in Congress because the gun lobby, namely the NRA, vehemently opposes it.

Another example is the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage was on the ballot in five states this year — four of them Republican-leaning: South Dakota, Alaska, Arkansas and Kansas — and it easily passed in each one. Yet such measures often get hung up in Congress and state legislatures. The federal minimum wage hasn’t increased for five years.

Most people have good reasons to brood over their economic circumstances, whether they’re earning minimum wage or higher. But taxes, while nobody’s favorite, are not what is “killing” people — the overall tax burden is lower now than at any point since the 1980s.

Taxes are an easy bugaboo, though, to distract from the harder-to-see siphoning of wealth from the bottom to the top. Wages and salaries for families in the bottom 90 percent haven’t budged in real terms since 2000, while the 1 percent are capturing a record share of national income.

What does that siphoning of wealth upward mean to families? Most people are reaping a smaller share of our country’s economic growth than they would have when things were more equal. The Economic Policy Institute, co-founded by Robert Reich, calls this an “inequality tax.” With 1979 as the base point, an average middle class family missed out on $11,670 of its share of the gains our economy produced in 2011.

In spite of this imbalance, it’s difficult to sustain a popular movement to push back against it. The Tea Party has lost some of its populist fervor, and Occupy Wall Street has faded. Earlier this month, Congress put on its Santa hat and passed an omnibus budget bill, which gave goodies to Wall Street (allowing banks to trade high-risk derivatives with federally insured deposits again, in language written by Citigroup) and big donors (raising maximum individual donations to political parties to $1.5 million per two-year cycle).

It’s high time for a resurgence of politicians who, in either party, have the courage to put Main Street before Wall Street. Two top things on the agenda should be to overturn Citizens United with a constitutional amendment and break up too-big-to-fail banks.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is leading the Democrats on this front, and hopefully more politicians will join her in a bipartisan effort to restore some of the progressive reforms won and gradually chipped away during the past century.

 

Albert Lea resident Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.