The congressman from $37,000
I can be categorized with many different groups -- parents, bicycle enthusiasts, disheartened Knick fans, Upper West Side New Yorkers. This last is thought to be so telling that it is often used as a shorthand for our politics. But although I share much with people in the neighborhood, I share more with people all over town, all over the country, whose economic circumstances are similar to mine.
Because it is our 1040s not our ZIP Codes that best express our political interests, congressional districts should be re-imagined to comprise not the people who happen to live within a few miles of one another, but those who earn within a few dollars of one another.
We could define a dozen or so income brackets. Every 647,000 people in a bracket -- the number of people assigned to a member of Congress -- would make up a congressional district. These districts could, where possible and convenient, agglomerate people who live more or less near each other, so that geography would not be entirely eliminated as a criterion; some concerns are indeed local. But place of residence would be made secondary to economics.
This approach would generate a series of physically overlapping districts. Depending upon their incomes, people in my apartment building would have different members of Congress. The people in the studio apartments facing the air shaft would not necessarily be lumped with those who have four bedrooms and a terrace.
There's nothing unprecedented about this; we already belong to different political parties and an assortment of advocacy groups, such as the AARP or the NRA, unconnected to regionalism. And we're comfortable with other overlapping political boundaries -- school districts, state assembly districts and election districts, for instance.
The result would be a Congress that better mirrored -- and more vigorously served -- its constituents. If half of all families in the country earn less than $37,000 a year, then half of the House would be elected by -- and sworn to work on behalf of -- those families. If only a handful of people earn seven-figure incomes, they would have only a few representatives.
There are other, less obvious, benefits. Big money's power to influence elections would be diminished, something campaign finance reform has failed to do. Wealthy interests -- those who would benefit from a low minimum wage, or relaxed clean-air rules for power plants, or a less progressive tax system -- would find it tough to woo a candidate whose working-class constituents oppose such policies. Or at least that candidate would find it awkward to explain why he took their money.
