THE WEAK AND THE RICH.

Robert Samuelson tends to write bizarre columns -- who can forget his wacky dream of a world in which teenagers spend their time picketing outside the AARP? -- but today's effort is, even by Samuelson standards, an unusual achievement. In it, he attempts to bust some myths about lobbying. He writes:

A second myth is that lobbying favors the wealthy, including corporations, because only they can afford the cost. As a result, government favors the rich and ignores the poor and middle class. Actually, the facts contradict that.

Sure, the wealthy extract privileges from government, but mainly they're its servants. The richest 1 percent of Americans pay 28 percent of federal taxes, says the Congressional Budget Office. About 60 percent of the $3 trillion federal budget goes for payments to individuals -- mostly the poor and middle class. You can argue that those burdens and benefits should be greater, but if the rich were all powerful, their taxes would be much lower. Similarly, the poor and middle class do have powerful advocates. To name three: AARP for retirees; the AFL-CIO for unionized workers; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for the poor.

The CBPP, huh? The poor have a powerful lobbying effort comprised of...people who make graphs about the budgetary implications of tax changes? Seriously? At least name ACORN or something. Give us your best effort! As for the rich, it's rather unclear what the absolute value of 28 percent means here. It depends, among other things, on whether the top one percent have a lot of money, or only a little money. But it's not that hard to track changes to the tax code. The following graph tracks the top marginal rates since the 1940s. Unless you think politicians change those rates because they like having less federal revenue to play with, than it would seem that the rich have some sway after all:

And here's the share of the national income for the top one percent:

So over the same period of time that the tax rates on the top one percent have fallen dramatically, their share of the national income has skyrocketed. The rich may not be "all powerful," but it's quite a leap to say that they are somehow cowering before the might of Robert Greenstein and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Indeed, over the same period, they managed to (at least temporarily) eliminate the "estate tax," which was a key tax on the rich. And if you don't believe that was the rich flexing their political power, then you haven't read this.

Meanwhile, the question of elite sensitivity to various types of constituent power is the sort of thing political scientists actually study. Samuelson doesn't seem to have asked any of them for their opinions, but Larry Bartels was kind enough to share his findings with me:

I know of two systematic attempts to measure the relative influence of affluent, middle-class, and poor people on government policy. One is in the next-to-last chapter of Unequal Democracy, where senators' roll call votes are moderately strongly affected by the preferences of high-income constituents, less strongly affected by the preferences of middle-income constituents, and totally unaffected by the preferences of low-income constituents. That's the more optimistic view. My Princeton colleague Marty Gilens (in a 2005 article in Public Opinion Quarterly and a book-in-progress) has a parallel analysis focusing on aggregate poilcy shifts over two decades. He also finds no discernible impact of low-income preferences, but argues that middle-class people also get ignored when they happen to disagree with rich people.