Media coverage, as Stewart pointed out on his show, has been largely non-existent. In contrast to the "Ground Zero Mosque" story earlier this year, there has been no interest in this story whipped up by media pundits on Fox News or other cable/network news outlets. That does not mean coverage of the 9/11 responders hasn't briefly taken place on news shows. It means this issue has not been turned into something that echoes around the country until elected officials step up and address the needs of 9/11 responders.
Why might this be? Does this have anything to do with the working or lower class backgrounds of the 9/11 responders seeking assistance?
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson spotlight "unrepresentative democracy" in their recent book, Winner Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. They cite a study by two professors who worked separately at Princeton University, Larry Bartels and Martin Gilens. Bartels and Gilens studied the "correspondence between what politicians do and what their constituents of differing economic backgrounds say they want them to do in opinion polls."
Bartels' study found that "wealthier Americans" are more likely to earn responses on issues from politicians in Washington than "less affluent" Americans. Bartels looked "at how closely aligned with voters U.S. senators were on key votes in the late 1980s and early 1990s." He found a "pretty high degree of congruence between senators' positions and the opinions of their constituents--at least when those constituents" were in the "top third of the income distribution." (The study by Bartels also found that when the poorest people supported a policy senators were actually less likely to vote for it.)
Gilens took the investigation to another level and collected "survey questions fielded since the 1980s" that asked people "whether they wanted government policy to change." He broke the population down into "income groups" and found that when policy changes had a good chance of becoming law, there was a huge amount of support for that change from those at the top. Hacker and Pierson write of the study, "When the opinions of the poor diverged from those of the well-off, the opinions of the poor ceased to have any apparent influence."
There are virtually no opinion polls in circulation on whether 9/11 responders should get healthcare or not, but one can imagine only a small, small percentage being opposed to such a measure.
What makes this hard for the wealthy or top 2% to support is how it would be paid for. Since the 1970s, business has worked together to protect the interests of all businesses in America and the tax loophole, if closed, would have significantly harmed business (at least if you ask lobbyists for business interests in America).
Would Americans vote "yes" in a poll asking if the closing of a tax loophole for corporations should be used to fund healthcare for 9/11 responders? That would likely show a key division in American society, with forty to sixty percent saying corporations have a duty to American society that would be fulfilled through helping 9/11 responders by closing the loophole or with forty to sixty percent saying political leaders should not play politics with this bill and try to fund it by pushing for a "controversial" end to a loophole for corporations.
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