The Distorted View from Capitol Hill

The Distorted View from Capitol Hill

By Thomas B. Edsall | nytimes | January 1, 2012, 9:00 pm

Excerpts:

“Last week, both The Washington Post and The Times published illuminating stories on the growing affluence of members of Congress. Both stories demonstrate how the economic fortunes of those elected to Congress have diverged radically from those of the men and women they represent.

For members of Congress, Lichtblau wrote, median net worth “is $913,000 and climbing” while for families in the country at large, it’s “$100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004.”

The articles demonstrate one of the crucial differences that separate federal elected officials from the rest of America. Members of the House and Senate are treated with inflated deference throughout their working days on Capitol Hill. They have their own police force, a research service, and a cast of thousands of subordinates and special services including doorkeepers, committee aides, private restaurants, free mailing privileges, television studios, airport parking without charge and more.

Each member of the House can hire a personal staff of 18 full-time and four part-time workers, all of whom devote their entire working lives to their bosses. Each representative controls his or her own annual budget, ranging from $1.4 million to $1.7 million depending on the distance from Washington that the member needs to travel.

Senators’ personal staffs range from 26 to 60 depending on the size of their state. Each senator controls an office budget that runs from $2,960,726 for those representing Delaware to $4,685,279 for each of the two senators from California.

There are, all together, a total of 6,804 House employees and an estimated 7,000 Senate staffers, all of whom are there to pay assiduous attention to the wishes of members. Unlike the average worker who now faces hard times if laid off, a member who loses re-election (or voluntarily retires) is virtually certain to have the option of a job paying in the $1 million-plus range in Washington’s influence-peddling industry.

Representatives and senators work, and in many cases live, in a city that does not reflect the makeup of the country. Instead, the city magnifies and exaggerates racial polarization.

The poor in the District of Columbia are overwhelmingly black. The city’s white population has a 6 percent poverty rate, lower than the white rate in every state, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The national average is 13 percent, and the closest competitors are Connecticut and New Jersey, each of which has an 8 percent white poverty rate. The Census Bureau defines poverty for a family of four as an income of $22,314 or less.

Black residents of Washington have a poverty rate of 27 percent, very close to the national average of 27.4 percent. Since the population of the city is 50.7 percent black, this translates to an estimated 83,590 blacks in poverty in the city compared to 12,560 whites in poverty in the area, a black to white ratio of 6.7 to 1. In essence, for every poor white in the city there are nearly seven African-Americans living beneath the poverty line.

In the entire United States, where blacks make up 12.6 percent of the population, the ratio is reversed. There were 19.5 million non-Hispanic whites under the poverty line and 10.9 million blacks, a black to white ratio of 1 to 1.8. In other words, in the entire country, for every poor black there are nearly two whites living under the poverty line. Nationally, according to the most recent census data, the 2010 poverty rate for non-Hispanic whites was 9.9 percent and for blacks 27.4 percent,

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Members of Congress are attuned to the economic conditions in their home districts and states, but living and working in Washington for much, if not most, of their time encourages the view that poverty is a black problem.

The overwhelming importance of race in defining poverty in Washington is also true of unemployment and crime.

The 2010 inmate population in the District of Columbia, according to the Department of Corrections, was 88 percent black, 6 percent Hispanic and 2 percent white. In contrast, the national state and federal prison population in 2010 was 37.7 percent black, 32.0 percent white and 22.2 percent Hispanic

In the case of unemployment in Washington, joblessness is heavily concentrated among blacks. A local think tank, the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, found that from 2007 to September, 2011, the unemployment rate for blacks in the city doubled, going from 10 percent to 20.6 percent.

Hispanic unemployment declined from 9.6 percent in 2007 to 7.9 percent in September 2011. Joblessness among whites increased, but from a minuscule starting point of 1.9 percent in 2007 to 3.7 percent in September.

The figures for the nation as a whole in September 2011 were also different: black unemployment nationally was 16 percent, white unemployment was at 8percent, and Hispanic joblessness was at 11.3 percent.

All these factors contribute to the effective racialization of inequality in the nation’s capital. It does so at a time when rising inequality is an issue Democrats and liberal advocacy groups are trying to emphasize during the upcoming election campaign.

Nationally, as the world now knows, rising inequality has been driven by the huge income gains among the top 1 percent, and, even more so, for the top 0.1 percent.

For the average wage earner, income has declined in recent years. Median income for all households, adjusted for inflation, fell 6.4 percent from 2007 ($52,823) to 2010 ($49,445), according to the census. For white households, the drop, 5.4 percent, $57,752 to $54,620, has been less severe than the 10.1 percent decline for black households, $35,665 to $32,068 and the 7.2 percent decline for Hispanic households, $40,673 to $37,759.

In terms of wealth and assets, the recent deterioration nationally, driven by the economic collapse, has been most severe among blacks and Hispanics, although whites have certainly not been exempt.

From 2005 to 2009, the median net worth of black households fell by a brutal 53 percent, from an already low figure of $12,124 to $5,677, according to the Pew Research Center. Median Hispanic household net worth fell even more, 66 percent, from $18,359 to $6,325. White households experienced a more modest but still painful 16 percent drop, from $134,992 to $113,149.

In Washington, inequality is driven almost entirely by the differences between the wages paid to whites and blacks. In 2010, whites earned $3.08 for every $1 earned by blacks. The black-white income difference is higher in the city than it is in any of the 11 surrounding counties in Virginia and Maryland. Overall, in the entire region, whites earn an average of $1.80 for every dollar earned by blacks.

The result is that the capital of the United States has a higher level of inequality than any state in the nation. Among the nation’s cities, it has the third-highest level of inequality, behind Atlanta and New Orleans, according to three different measures used by the census.

The unrepresentative character of the city serves to reinforce conservative stereotypes: That unemployment and poverty are essentially black problems, that violent crime is committed mainly by African-Americans, and that any spending to relieve these problems or any other domestic trouble will amount to a transfer of income from whites to blacks.

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conclusion:

To top off the corrupting and warping effects of the forces pressing on House members and senators in Washington, their sense of self-importance is magnified by the power of Congress over the local government.

Congress, in one of the most undemocratic processes in the nation, can veto legislation passed by the City Council and signed into law by the mayor; all city judges must be approved by Congress; and Congress can impose laws on the city. And of course Washington residents do not have voting representation in either the House or the Senate.

This is not just a theoretical issue. At various times since 1988, for example, Congress has enacted temporary bans against the use of locally raised taxes or fees to finance abortions in the city, and most recently, on May 4, the House voted 251-175, with all 235 Republicans present voting yes, to make the ban permanent.

Congress has constitutional authority to exercise these powers, but it would be far less likely to do so if the city’s majority population was white rather than black. If power corrupts, in America race often leads to the corrupt exercise of power and to the denial of political autonomy.

The distortion of economic and racial reality for members of Congress living and working in Washington contributes to their tendency to view the consequences of budget cuts and austerity measures as affecting primarily individuals and families with whom they believe they have little in common.

They often see or choose to see these people as separate and apart from both themselves and from the mainstream of the United States.”

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/the-distorted-view-from-capitol-hill/?ref=opinion
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We see how out of touch Congress and the White House are with the impoverishment of the middle class and the poor while they live in luxury and are treated like royalty instead of public officials that have a duty to serve the country in humility, honesty, and perseverance. Instead they have become the royalty in America, treated deferentially and taking taxpayers’ money in luxurious and unneeded staff,

By ignoring the blacks, the very people in Washington who are in dire poverty, to ignore the Hispanics who try to make a living, and to ignore the white Americans who lost their former style of living to an outsourcing scheme by wealthy corporations and ex-president Bush, and watched their jobs disappear overseas so that their companies could get cheap unskilled help to work long hours, so those companies could earn more profits and stash their undeclared earnings in overseas bank accounts is so vile, unpatriotic, and disgusting that any sitting president should have been arrested and sent to jail.