j.r. leonard

4/Gilens and Page ALSO find that the policy preferences of the households making >$146k are HIGHLY correlated with the preferences of the households making median income. In other words, the upper-middle-class and slightly-wealthy want mostly the same things as the middle class.

5/Also, Gilens and Page don't isolate causation from correlation. It could be that policy is slightly more correlated with the preferences of the upper-middle-class because politicians themselves happen to come from that class, not because of any influence of money on politics.

9/Elkjaer and Iversen (2018): "government policies largely reflect the economic preferences of the middle class...middle-class power has remained remarkably stable over time...The rich have no or little influence on redistributive policies" http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~iversen/PDFfiles/Elkjaer&Iversen2018.pdf …

10/Branham et al. (2017): "We find that the rich and middle almost always agree and, when they disagree, the rich win only slightly more often. Even when the rich do win, resulting policies do not lean point systematically in a conservative direction." https://jabranham.com/papers/when-do-the-rich-win.pdf …