Part 12 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more.
The previous installment looked at where the money goes. This one looks at why the political system has not redirected it, which is a question I find harder to answer in a tidy way than the structural-economics questions in earlier installments. The honest answer is that the cost-shifting that this series has been describing is the product of policy choices made by elected officials over five decades, and those choices have been bipartisan in two distinct senses that I want to keep separate, because they have very different implications.
The first sense: the long arc
The structural choices that produced the current cost-shifting framework were made over a half-century, mostly through legislation and executive-branch interpretation, and at every major step both parties were complicit. The 1980 Reagan-era deregulation of trucking, airlines, and finance had substantial Democratic support. The 1982 SEC rule that effectively legalized modern stock buybacks was issued under a Republican administration and never seriously revisited under any subsequent Democratic one. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, which I covered in Part 7, was signed by Bill Clinton and passed the House 414-16 and the Senate 91-5, which is what bipartisan support actually looks like; net neutrality has been imposed, repealed, restored, and re-killed across both administrations of both parties since. The 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the parts of Glass-Steagall that separated commercial and investment banking and is generally regarded as one of the structural preconditions of the 2008 financial crisis, was signed by Clinton on a 90-8 Senate vote and 362-57 House vote, with overwhelming Democratic support. The 2018 Dodd-Frank rollback, which raised the “systemically important” threshold for banks from $50 billion to $250 billion in assets, was a Trump-administration bill that passed the Senate 67-31 with seventeen Democratic votes.
In the long arc, both parties have been part of the cost-shifting consensus, and the moments of pushback — the 2009 Credit CARD Act, the 2010 Dodd-Frank establishment of the CFPB, the 2022 No Surprises Act, the various Biden-era FTC and FCC and CFPB rules — have been the exceptions inside a long bipartisan accommodation rather than the rule. That accommodation has structural causes I cannot fully untangle here, but the largest one is the obvious one: both parties are funded substantially by the corporate sectors whose interests would be most directly affected by serious reform. The Federal Election Commission and OpenSecrets data confirm what common observation suggests — the same corporate PACs give to candidates in both parties, often in similar proportions, in nearly every cycle.
The 2024 cycle numbers, which OpenSecrets has fully compiled, illustrate this. Direct PAC contributions to federal candidates totaled $452.8 million. The largest sector was Finance/Insurance/Real Estate at $82.6 million. The Health sector contributed $52.2 million. Both sectors split their giving relatively evenly between the parties, as they have done for decades. Republicans take in somewhat more corporate PAC money on aggregate than Democrats, and the gap has narrowed over the last two presidential cycles, but the headline reality is that the corporate sectors whose policy positions matter most for this series fund both parties enough to ensure access regardless of which is in power. Total federal lobbying spending in 2024 was roughly $4.4 billion, and the largest-spending sectors are again the ones whose business models depend on the policy choices this series has been documenting.
The second sense: what happens in any given moment
The bipartisan structural pattern is real but it is not the whole story. At any given moment, the two parties’ actual behavior on these issues is meaningfully different, and pretending otherwise is itself a way of demobilizing the kind of reform politics that could shift the structural pattern.
The most concrete recent example is the comparison I started in Part 6 (food monopolies) and continued in Part 7 (telecom). The Biden-era Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan blocked the $24.6 billion Kroger-Albertsons grocery merger in December 2024, in what was probably the most aggressive antitrust enforcement action against a consumer-facing merger in three decades. The Trump-era Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr approved the $34.5 billion Charter-Cox cable merger in February 2026, citing among other public-interest benefits Charter’s agreement to end its DEI programs. Same dollar magnitude. Same regulatory framework. Same theoretical legal standard. Opposite outcomes. Different administrations.
The credit card late fee story I told in Part 9 is the same pattern at smaller scale. The Biden-era CFPB under Rohit Chopra finalized a rule capping large-issuer credit card late fees at $8 in March 2024. The same agency, under Russell Vought as acting director following the change of administration in January 2025, joined the plaintiffs in April 2025 to vacate the rule entirely. The rule that would have saved households roughly $10 billion a year was not killed by a court so much as it was abandoned by the next administration’s appointees.
You can find the same comparison in nearly every category this series has touched. The Biden-era National Labor Relations Board was meaningfully more pro-union in its rulings than its Trump-era predecessor or successor. The Biden-era Department of Labor pursued overtime expansion and gig-worker classification rules that the Trump-era DOL is now reversing. The Biden-era FTC pursued the Junk Fees Rule and the non-compete-clause ban; the current FTC is unwinding parts of both. The CFPB itself is, as of this writing, in the middle of a rolling reduction in its operational capacity that may render it functionally inactive by the end of the year regardless of what its formal rulebook says.
The honest synthesis is that the long-run trend is bipartisan, but the short-run policy actions are differentiable, and the differentiation matters at the household level. Households whose financial security depended on the credit card late fee cap are roughly $220 a year worse off because of the post-2025 change in CFPB leadership. Households whose health coverage depended on Medicaid expansion are worse off in states that did not take the expansion. The aggregate effect of any single administration on the cost-shifting picture is smaller than the partisan rhetoric implies, but it is not zero.
The Affordable Care Act, fairly described
I want to use the ACA as a worked example because it is the largest single piece of social legislation passed in the post-2008 period and because the partisan and structural readings of it are both partly correct and partly misleading.
The ACA passed in 2010 with no Republican votes in either chamber. It expanded Medicaid in the states that took the expansion, which is roughly forty of the fifty states; ten states have still not taken it, and the uninsured rate is meaningfully higher in those states. It ended preexisting-condition exclusions, capped lifetime coverage limits, allowed children to stay on parents’ plans until twenty-six, and mandated coverage of preventive care without cost-sharing. It also imposed the medical loss ratio cap I discussed in Part 8, which forced insurers to spend at least eighty to eighty-five percent of premium dollars on actual medical care. The uninsured rate fell from roughly thirteen percent at passage to around eight percent now, with most of the gain concentrated in expansion states.
What the ACA did not do, in the version that passed, was create a public-option insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers in the individual market. The public option had been part of the original House version and was removed in the Senate negotiation because Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who caucused with Democrats, said he would not vote for cloture if it included the public option, and the Democratic caucus needed his sixtieth vote. Lieberman represented a state in which the insurance industry was a major employer and donor, and the structural reading is that the insurance industry’s lobbying preference for an individual mandate without a public option was the binding political constraint on what the Democratic majority could deliver. The narrower reading is that the public option was killed by one specific senator’s specific vote, and that the political-economy story is just the explanation of why he cast that vote.
Both readings are true. The ACA was the largest expansion of healthcare coverage since the creation of Medicare in 1965, and it has improved real lives in real ways. It is also a law shaped by the structural fact that the private insurance industry funds both parties and that no Democratic majority in the last fifty years has been willing to threaten the industry’s core business model. The honest political assessment is that the Democratic Party as a whole moved further on healthcare access in 2009-2010 than at any point in living memory and stopped short of the structural reforms that would have addressed the underlying cost-shifting machine.
Whether that stopping-short was a failure of political will or a recognition of political reality is a question I am not in a position to settle. What I can say is that the post-2010 trajectory of health insurance — premiums up, deductibles up, prior authorization expanded, vertical integration accelerated — is the trajectory the structural reading would predict, and it has continued through both subsequent administrations.
The polling gap
One of the more striking features of the current American political landscape is that significant reforms to the cost-shifting picture have, in poll after poll, majority support across both parties’ voters. Medicare drug-price negotiation has run consistently above eighty percent support across multiple recent surveys. Restoring net neutrality has historically polled in the seventy-to-eighty percent range. Higher minimum wages have polled in the sixty-to-seventy percent range. Some form of Medicare expansion polls between fifty-five and seventy percent depending on the framing. Breaking up the largest banks has polled above fifty percent. Antitrust enforcement against the largest technology and grocery and pharmaceutical companies has polled above fifty percent, frequently above sixty.
The translation of those polling numbers into legislation has been substantially smaller than the polling would predict. Drug-price negotiation, in the form that passed in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, covers ten initial drugs negotiated over a multi-year phased schedule, and pharmaceutical companies retain a number of avenues to limit its effect. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009, despite consistent majority support for an increase. Net neutrality is, as of January 2025, legally dead at the federal level. Antitrust enforcement made real progress in the Biden administration through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division and has substantially retreated since the change in administration.
The gap between what polls support and what passes is what the structural reading of American politics is mainly about. Voters cannot purchase legislation. Donors can purchase access, attention, and the structural environment within which legislation gets drafted or not drafted. The disproportion between the two scales is itself the answer to why the cost-shifting persists.
What I see from here
I have spent twenty-five years inside large corporate media organizations and four years now running a small business. The political ecosystem I have observed up close is the one in which corporate executives serve on the boards of trade associations that hire former federal officials and current campaign donors to write the position papers that shape the legislation, with very limited friction between any of those steps. The system is not a conspiracy. It is the legal outcome of allowing concentrated economic power to function as concentrated political power in a country whose campaign finance regime is structured to require private corporate fundraising at every level. The structure produces the outcome regardless of which party is in charge of any given agency or chamber.
The honest version of the political case I have been building across this series is that the cost-shifting is a bipartisan structural feature of American capitalism in its current form, and that breaking the cost-shifting requires structural reforms that neither party as currently constituted has the will or the donor permission to pursue. Voting for one party rather than the other matters at the margin — the Biden-era CFPB and FTC were measurably better than what came before and after — but it does not address the underlying mechanism. The underlying mechanism would require either changes to the campaign finance regime, changes to the antitrust enforcement regime, changes to the corporate tax code, changes to the labor law regime, or some combination of all of those that no presidential administration has assembled a coalition to push through in the last forty-five years.
That is not a counsel of despair. It is a recognition that the political work this kind of reform would require is a multi-decade project of building a coalition that does not currently exist with the funding the existing coalition currently uses. The post-2008 Occupy movement and the 2016-2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the recent revival of organized labor at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are arguably early signs of such a coalition forming, and arguably not. The honest answer is that I do not know. What I am reasonably sure of, after twelve installments of this series, is that the cost-shifting will not stop because one party wins one election. It will stop, if it stops, because the political-economic conditions that produced it have been changed at a more fundamental level than any single election can produce.
The next installment looks at the timeline — how the choices that produced the current structure were made, decade by decade, since the early 1970s.
Even that's Odd 
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