This is your Congress on drugs

Corruption kills.

Back in 2014, a pair of political scientists published a study of 1,779 US “policy issues” over 20 years, concluding that elected officials make policy to benefit the richest ten percent of the country to the exclusion of the needs of everyone else.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

This was true irrespective of whether there was mass pressure from citizen groups. In the USA, politicians make sure that richest ten percent get whatever they want and do nothing for the rest of us.

I find this study incredibly depressing and do my best to keep it out of my mind. After all, while this is true in nearly every case, we all know about instances in which policy supported the many and not the few. The formation of the FTC and EPA was not the product of a fallen civilization in possession of lost and unfathomnable technology.

So I soldier on, telling myself “This isn’t the kind of fight we win, it’s the kind of fight we fight” (as the epigraph from my 2019 collection Radicalized has it), but every now and then, well… Ugh.

The Democrats set to kill pharma price controls in the Build Back Better plan.