• [Analysis] Congressional aides have no clue what Americans want
    18 replies, posted
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/opinion/congress-midterms-public-opinion.html Whether the Democrats or the Republicans seize control of Congress after the midterms, you can be sure of one thing: They will have very little idea what laws the public actually wants them to act on. The current Republican-controlled Congress is a good example. Its signature accomplishment is a tax-cut bill that hardly anyone likes or asked for and that is estimated to add about $2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Congress doesn’t know what policies Americans support. We know that because we asked the most senior staff members in Congress — the people who help their bosses decide what bills to pursue and support — what they believed public opinion was in their district or state on a range of issues. In a research paper, we compared their responses with our best guesses of what the public in their districts or states actually wanted using large-scale public opinion surveys and standard models. Across the board, we found that congressional aides are wildly inaccurate in their perceptions of their constituents’ opinions and preferences. For instance, if we took a group of people who reflected the makeup of America and asked them whether they supported background checks for gun sales, nine out of 10 would say yes. But congressional aides guessed as few as one in 10 citizens in their district or state favored the policy. Shockingly, 92 percent of the staff members we surveyed underestimated support in their district or state for background checks, including all Republican aides and over 85 percent of Democratic aides. The same is true for the four other issues we looked at: regulating carbon emissions to address the climate crisis, repealing the Affordable Care Act, raising the federal minimum wage and investing in infrastructure. On climate change, the average aide thought only a minority of his or her district wanted action, when in truth a majority supported regulating carbon. Our research isn’t unique: As a similar study showed, state politicians also do a poor job guessing public opinion of their constituents. We found two key factors that explain why members of Congress are so ignorant of public preferences: their staffs’ own beliefs and congressional offices’ relationships with interest groups. Aides usually assumed that the public agreed with their own policy views. If an aide did not personally support acting on climate change, he or she was less likely to think that constituents wanted action. This self-centered bias is common in other areas of life — we all tend to think that other people share our preferences. But we aren’t all charged with understanding what the public wants to ensure democratic representation. Interest groups also played an important role in explaining congressional staffs’ errors. Aides who reported meeting with groups representing big business — like the United States Chamber of Commerce or the American Petroleum Institute — were more likely to get their constituents’ opinions wrong compared with staffers who reported meeting with mass membership groups that represented ordinary Americans, like the Sierra Club or labor unions. The same pattern holds for campaign contributions: The more that offices get support from fossil fuel companies over environmental groups, the more they underestimate state- or district-level support for climate action. We should not place all the blame on Congress. The public contributes to the problem by not taking the time to express its opinions to politicians or vote. For example, recent polling shows that supporters of tighter gun regulations are much less likely to contact Congress than those who oppose gun control. Without citizen participation, it’s hard to imagine how political staffs can accurately gauge public attitudes in their districts and states.
We should not place all the blame on Congress. The public contributes to the problem by not taking the time to express its opinions to politicians or vote. For example, recent polling shows that supporters of tighter gun regulations are much less likely to contact Congress than those who oppose gun control. Without citizen participation, it’s hard to imagine how political staffs can accurately gauge public attitudes in their districts and states. Just like global warming, it's your very personal fault that your representatives act exclusively in the interests of the unbelievably wealthy. Why aren't you doing your job citizen?
this is absolutely a product of the insulting nature of the office now. My congressman has never responded to any emails, his office goes to voicemail, he never holds townhalls and he only holds these weird video townhalls where the questions are all prescreened. Additionally the way the parties severely discourage individual agendas further restricts what your rep is going to do.
Here's what I want from Congress, prioritized. * Drastic action on climate change. Like WW2-era holy-shit-we-gotta-fucking-do-this-or-we-all-die levels of effort. An immediate carbon tax (or a tax on carbon-emitting fuels, effectively the same) that's high enough to make people stop driving huge-ass F250s as passenger cars, ramping up even higher in the future. Take that money and throw it at everything - BEV charging infrastructure, LiON and LiPo R&D, any type of carbon-free power (hydro, photovoltaics, photothermal, wind, tidal, any type of nuclear), power storage, carbon-capture technology, reforestation, and as a Plan Z (because it might be too late for plans A through Y), hardening coastal cities against sea level rise and developing crops that can feed us after a 4C temperature rise. * Single-payer healthcare. Just fucking do it already. I'm paying $300/mo for the bare minimum of health insurance, basically just enough that I wouldn't get bankrupted if I got hit by a bus. Once you've got a monopsony, use that to force prices downward - because we literally have the most expensive healthcare on the planet, while being near the bottom of the industrialized world in overall health. Fuck that. I don't care much how - medicare for all, or a whole new system, or what - just so long as it works better than what we've got now. * Stop making democracy itself a partisan issue. Expand the Voting Rights Act so that any attempt to disenfranchise voters or even weaken votes with shit like gerrymandering, is illegal. Like capital-offense-level illegal. Make federal-level standards for election security - including actual paper ballots, since our digital voting systems have proven to be completely broken time and time again. Actual changes to election systems ought to be considered (popular vote for president when?) but that's not a code red level demand. * Gun control. Open with "literally take everyone's guns away" and compromise from there - not because that's the actual thing I want (it isn't) but because the NRA-dictated position of "lol who needs background checks as long as your credit card works, let's repeal NFA and start selling tommy guns to toddlers again" is equally absurd and extreme, and the only way to get to a point where schools aren't getting shot up weekly is to drag the Overton window back to the realm of sanity. We should probably end up somewhere moderately looser than Europe - our large rural areas mean we do have a significantly higher actual need for privately-owned firearms - but still far stricter than our current system. * Balanced budget. Take the Trump and Bush tax cuts and burn them at the stake. Anyone (person or corporation) earning over $1B/year needs to be paying an effective, after-deductions tax rate in the 90% range. Close the tax-haven loopholes, the religious exemptions (render unto caesar, bitches), and cut the obvious pork from he budget too, since I doubt even such extreme tax hikes will balance our bloated budget (especially since the climate-change and healthcare things will balloon the budget).
The things is, if a Democrats becomes president in 2020, they're only going to be in power for two years, then it'll be like 2010 again. People will think everything's good again and voter turnout will be abysmal again. Democrats will also never have the Republican level of political capital since Democrats critizise their own leaders when they fuck up.
Would you mind snail-mailing that to your congressman? I don't know if he browses facepunch.
I probably actually will, after the midterms, not much sense sending a list of demands to a person with a month or two left on the job. And it needs some editing, that list was pretty disorganized.
That's honestly weird as hell. I'd expect that if you had a job like that, part of it would be to read polls, town halls, etc..
Here's a suggestion: Use the money for the carbon tax to invest in plants to clear the carbon already up in the atmosphere. All that CO2 can be resold for industrial purposes so it's not entirely profit-less.
The two main issues I have with that are gun control which I'm just going to gloss over quickly because I do not want to derail this thread with a gun control debate and the carbon tax. While sure it'd be good to discourage well-off persons from buying mobile carbon emitters, the prices of electric cars are way out of reach for many Americans. Most people look for cars under $5,000 dollars, but the cheapest electric I've found was the Smart ForTwo Electric at around $24,000. Range is also a concern for a lot of people who are forced to travel upwards of 20 miles to reach work, and still have to get back home at the end of the day, that's half the ForTwo's distance right there. I do think cities would adopt ordinances to promote compact cars like Japan's kei cars, to reduce emissions, reduce traffic, and increase space. In addition, better public transportation needs to be offered, and needs to be competitive with gas prices, but I don't know how they'll fund it tbh.
While carbon capture is a long-term necessity, at this moment replacing carbon emitters with non-emitters provides more bang for the buck. The tech just isn't really ready yet - the stuff that can be done at scale is too energy-intensive (ie. more carbon is emitted powering them than they recapture), and the stuff that can be done as a net carbon negative doesn't work at scale. That will change over time, and we should invest in R&D for it, but right now we're much better off spending the bulk of the money on non-carbon-emitting energy sources. The people buying $5K cars are buying used ones, not new. Even the ones buying $10K cars are buying used - literally the cheapest new car I could find is $13000. There are some early electric cars down in the sub-$10K range, used. I see 2011 Leaf, 2012 i-MIEV, $8000 on Carmax. It will take some time for electrics to trickle onto the used market, but the faster the new market becomes 90%+ electric, the faster the used market will follow. What might actually do even more to push electric cars is to mandate electric chargers in apartment parking lots, and on public-parking streets. Not fast chargers, just the normal 240V ones, or even 120V. I could easily have an electric car - I literally had to decide between the electric and gas models of my current car when buying it, at the same price - but I wouldn't be able to charge it because I don't own a house, and the nearest charger station is further away than my daily commute, by an order of magnitude.
I guess I'll send some letters to Eric Swallwel, Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein telling them that I would prefer gun legislation to be conducted by county so us people in SF Bay don't control the lives of people in the rest of the state. I also want to tell them that I want some coochie
Not a surprise whatsoever. Politicians are geared towards people who vote, not the American public as a whole. And the people who vote - especially in primaries - are more likely to be partisan than not.
How can they serve citizens but be so out of touch?
I agree with pretty much everything you've said, except for the fact that (as far as I understand our law and the current supreme court standing on the issue), it is legally not possible to take away tax-exemption from only religious non-profits, any more than it is possible to make tax-exemptions exclusive to religious non-profts. The only way you would be able to accomplish this is by legally abolishing the non-profit exemptions entirely, and I doubt you'll find much support for that. You will find no argument from me, however, against removing religious organization's preferred status in the law at it stands (it is a fact that they are getting special treatment compared to other kinds of non-profits), as well as cracking down on the regular violation of the law against political campainging by many churches.
Drop the gun control and you've got my vote
If citizens don't participate, all that officials will hear is the word of lobbyists. The exact same thing that allows them to directly communicate with these officials allows you or a citizens organization to do the same.
Doug Jones runs a program called Donuts with Doug where if you live in Alabama you can schedule a meeting at a donut shop with him, you can even pick what subject to talk about.
I agree with most of what you say except this bit for a few reasons and gun control which this isn't really a place fora debate on. While in metro areas this would be fine this would disproportionately screw over people in a lot of rural areas. It's very common for rural people to only have big ass trucks because they actually utilize them so for hauling shit very frequently. And since those rigs are already bad on gas mileage as it is, increasing those costs would make keeping their vehicles prohibitively expensive while impacting their ability to actually replace their vehicles.
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