Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Welcome to the Plutocracy: Senate Edition

So, you know how it's supposed to be harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle.* Well, two things:

     1) That's not as hard as it seems, since a sufficiently rich man can pay to have people build him a huge-ass needle.

     2) In fact, it is not as hard as a poor man being elected to the United States Senate.





If you go to the original, you can scroll around and zoom in and stuff. If not, all you need to know is that Alaska and Hawaii fall in the puke-green colored,  greater than 1 million, but less than 3.16 million category.

This map was constructed on TargetMap using data from the Center for Responsive Politics. These are estimates of net worth, and the numbers I have used are the average of the minimum and maximum estimates. It should be noted that the difference between the minimum and maximum estimates is typically quite large.

What I find interesting here is not so much the relative numbers, but the absolute scale. Note that it is only the green states where the Senators are (on average) NOT millionaires. The red states are where the average net worth is greater than 31 million (10^7.5, actually).

Next up: The House of Representatives.

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* Or, for the Lolcatarians out there, it is to fit a Great Dane into a tiny cat carrier than for a Fancy Feast kitty to go to the Ceiling (Matthew 19:23-24):

23 Den Jeezus sai to hiz desiplz, "Im teh srs, it teh sux 4 a rich kittn to go 2 teh Ceiling.24 Aiz tel yu geiz agin, it srsly moar easier 4 graet daen to fit in teh tiny cat cariur dan for fancey feast kitteh two go to teh Howse uf teh Ceiling Cat."

1 comment:

  1. "That's not as hard as it seems, since a sufficiently rich man can pay to have people build him a huge-ass needle."

    Look at this comic by Quino (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quino):

    http://bit.ly/eE6eww

    Translation to English:

    - Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

    -Sir?

    - Call the natural science museum at Cairo, and find all the dimensions a Camel may have.

    - Then call the Krupp foundry in Essen, Germany. Ask for the chief of engineering. Then pass me the call.

    ReplyDelete