Politics as usual

There's a good reason that many Americans view members of Congress as rich and out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans: Most are, indeed, rich and well insulated from the challenges that confront ordinary Americans.

Well over half of the members of Congress -- 250 of 435 -- and most members of the Senate are millionaires. New data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics and other sources, moreover, shows that the wealth gap between members of Congress and ordinary Americans is widening. The inflation-adjusted median net worth of members of Congress, for example, climbed 15 percent from 2004 to 2010, while Americans' median net worth plunged 8 percent in the same period.

The financial trend for Congress has given members a median net worth of $1.2 million. In addition to their base salary of $174,000, they also enjoy a high level of benefits and perks. These include generous pensions and health insurance as well as the perks of power -- fine dining and travel that are frequently financed by their campaign funds, by private sponsors or by government (taxpayer) sponsored fact-finding junkets.

The median net worth (the value of assets minus debts) of regular Americans, by contrast, fell from $108,000 to $100,000 from 2004 to 2010. And while the official unemployment rate has just fallen under the 9 percent mark, the after-shocks of the financial implosion 2008 and the Great Recession that event spurred remain all too apparent. The high level of under-employment remains formidable, and the official level of unemployment overlooks several million chronically unemployed who have quit looking for work and thus are not counted in the official unemployment figure.

Many Americans, from the unemployed to the legions of under-compensated workers stuck in low-wage/low-benefit jobs, are uninsured for health care, or have no health insurance at all. But with the wealth gap between members of Congress and rank-and-file Americans now larger than at most any previous time, Congress seems particularly unsympathetic toward the broad plight of working and out-of-work Americans.

Republicans' tea-party right wing continues to protect the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1 percent while advocating cuts for the most important elements of the nation's already tattered safety net programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment compensation, public health clinics, housing assistance, education and student loans, food stamps and school lunch programs.

The longer that members of Congress and the Senate serve, moreover, the more the wealth gap between Congress and rank-and-file Americans seems to worsen. One reason is that the soaring cost of campaigning in America's increasingly splintered media markets naturally draws candidates who possess enough wealth to jump-start their campaigns. Once they get elected, the more likely they are, as incumbents, to rely on campaign donations from rich donors and lobbyists for vested interests, and to capitalize on decennial redistricting mandates to gerrymander districts that favor their re-election.

That creates a perpetual fund-raising dynamic that favors the vested business and political interests of large donors, and legislation by indentured politicians that primarily benefits their special-interest patrons.

For all their noisy false piety, the current crop of tea party politicians who swept into power in 2010 have quickly fallen into this pattern. Their House members have shown themselves just as willing as any of their predecessors to vote for pork for their districts and donors, and tax policies that expand their political power and wealth, along with that of their richest and biggest donors.

That's not what they promised. But, then again, they're politicians.

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