Flight delays are important, but what about Head Start and Meals on Wheels?

Congress has decided, forcefully and unequivocally, that air travelers are more important to them than poor kids and old folks. In voting to allow the FAA flexibility in its furlough policies for air traffic controllers, lawmakers are responding to one group of constituents (air travelers, especially those flying for business) and ignoring other groups (folks who receive jobless benefits and government-funded meals as just two examples). That's sequestration for you - across-the-board budget cuts, except when it inconveniences too many voters and campaign contributors. Via Slate's Matthew Yglesias, political scientist Larry Bartels looked at the connection between politics and economic inequality in a 2005 paper.

What Bartels did was look at public opinion views of people in the bottom third, the middle third, and the top third of the income distribution. Then he looked at how well senators' votes match the opinions of their constituents. He finds that both Democrats and Republicans do a fair amount to try to align their views with those of their middle-income constituents. Democrats respond to their high-income constituents about as strongly as they do to their middle-income ones. Republicans are very responsive to their rich constituents. And neither party cares what poor people think. So it turns out that when Congress cuts domestic discretionary spending "across the board," it doesn't really cut it across the board. A program that's important to prosperous frequent travelers gets spared the ax.

From the Washington Post's Jim Tankersley:

The rest of the country understands how badly the economy continues to hurt ordinary Americans. Washington apparently doesn't. The federal government has failed for several years now to pass meaningful legislation to boost growth and job creation, a partisan paralysis that holds while 12 million people look for work but can't find it - but which vanishes in a matter of days when it comes to fixing delays at the nation's airports. Americans feel this disconnect. They've felt it for years. They've grown accustomed to the federal government being unable or unwilling to respond to the hurricane forces of lost jobs, falling wealth and stagnating incomes. And they've grown pessimistic and angry about it.