Corporate influence and corruption defines American politics. No wonder most think the country is headed in the wrong direction
In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy”.
Seven years later, America is witnessing a very public and explicit illustration of this situation in real time – and the country seems pretty ticked off about it, in the lead-up to Tuesday’s off-year elections and in advance of the upcoming midterms next year.
82% of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare – and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72% saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill. On Tuesday, Democrats announced they had reached a deal on a drug pricing plan, which Politico described as “far weaker” than Democrats’ promised legislation. One industry analyst said the deal “seems designed to let legislators claim an achievement while granting pharma protection”.
The poll also found that 70% of voters support including paid family and medical leave for new parents in Democrats’ spending bill. Manchin has demanded this item be cut.
After railing against the Republicans’ 2017 tax law for years, Democrats have largely refused to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and their final bill may even end up being a net tax cut for the rich. This, even though Biden’s own pollsters found that raising taxing on the wealthy was “the most popular of more than 30 economic proposals” they tested during the 2020 presidential campaign.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
Andrew Perez is a senior editor at the Daily Poster and a co-founder of the Democratic Policy Center
This article was originally published in the Daily Poster, a grassroots-funded investigative news outlet
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