There has been a disturbing trend recently in politics. Many state governments, as well as the federal government, have been struggling to balance budgets which are in serious danger of going bust. Whether the leaders are primarily Republican or Democrat, there has been one constant in the various solutions: it is acceptable to cut services to the poor, as well as force the middle class to take cutbacks in pensions and salaries, but it is not acceptable to raise taxes on the rich. For example, the governor of New Jersey has refused to require people earning more than $250,000 per year to pay an increase of 1% on the top of their income (which is mere pocket change for those people), while he is pushing for all teachers to take deep cuts of $5,000-$8,000 from their salaries. Meanwhile, the federal government refused to raise the top rate on income taxes while pushing to skewer medical benefits for the elderly and poor.

There is a simple reason for such policies. As election campaigns have become more and more expensive in recent decades, driven primarily by the use of television as the primary campaign medium, only rich people can afford to run for public office. Consider these statistics from CBS Evening News:

• there were 261 millionaires in Congress out of a total of 535 members in 2010;
• 49% of Congress were millionaires, as compared to 2.5% of the total population;
• the median wealth of a House member in 2009 stood at $765,010;
• the median wealth for a senator in 2009 was nearly $2.38 million.

Both Congress and many state legislatures are controlled by the rich, which invariably leads to those people’s primary concern being to protect their wealth and that of their peers, no matter what the harmful effect may be on the middle class and poor. The inevitable effect of this policy is to tilt our country’s economy even more towards the rich, which is the hallmark of a third world country. Consider these statistics from http://www.mybudget360.com:

• the top 1% of the population controlled 42% of the wealth in the United States in 2007;
• the top 10% had 87.5% of all investments in the United States in 2007.

That proportion is becoming even more lopsided as legislatures blatantly favor the rich more and more, with the support of a large portion of the electorate. Consider these statistics from G. William Domhoff of the Sociology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html):

• in 1983, the top 20% of the population controlled 81% of the wealth in the U.S.;
• in 2007, the top 20% of the population controlled 85% of the wealth in the U.S.

The question that needs to be considered is this: since the overwhelming majority of voters in this country are middle class people and poor people, why are they electing so many rich people to represent them, especially since it is becoming increasingly obvious that those electees have no intention of actually representing anybody but their fellow rich?

Not only are legislators favoring rich people, but rich corporations have their support as well. Most people have read about General Electric being the world’s largest corporation in the lowest tax bracket, but they are not unique. Over 100 companies on the S&P500 paid less than 20 percent in taxes last year (see http://www.businessinsider.com).

Meanwhile, the giant oil companies continue to receive tax rebates from the federal government while they conspire to raise gas prices and earn record profits nearly every quarter. How does this happen? One factor might be that big corporations regularly pay large amounts of money to members of Congress who obligingly create tax loopholes exempting those corporations from paying their fair share in taxes.

So not only are members of Congress growing richer while supposedly serving the public, but they are responsible for both their rich friends and the rich corporations amassing more wealth as well, all at the expense of the middle class and poor people who comprise between 99% of the country’s populace.

Can anybody spell G-R-E-E-D?

Is there a solution to all this malfeasance? The only recommendations I can make are two:

• Do not vote for any rich person for federal or state governments;
• Do not vote for anybody who supports tax breaks for big corporations.

Will this have an effect? Probably not, since most people base their political vote on personality and rhetoric, rarely paying attention to a candidate’s economic policies. They believe their evasions and lies, totally ignoring their history of favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of their voters. The governor of New Jersey has gone to great lengths to portray himself as a crusader saving the state budget at the expense of greedy public employees, while in effect he has neither balanced the budget nor lowered state taxes at all, while skewering public education and protecting the rich. And yet he is widely-popular among middle class people because many voters simplistically believe what he says, even though it runs counter to everything he has actually done.

This is more evidence that Americans’ disregard for the importance of education is dooming this country. As the rich continue to get richer, and the middle class gets poorer, the voting populace allows this to happen by continually electing rich people who only care about their own fiscal situation while everybody else wallows in their misery. And most voters have absolutely no idea that they are allowing this to happen; in fact, by electing such self-serving candidates, the voters are responsible for their own demise and, ultimately, the United States’ degeneration into a third world country run exclusively by and for rich people and rich corporations only.

Perhaps more voters should wake up and start studying how politics in Brazil and Mexico have affected the overall standard of living in those countries, to see where the United States is headed in the not-too-distant future.