Spending, like a gas, expands to occupy the income that contains it. Not always, but almost always. In 2012, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan had a great excoriation of complaints by the wealthy that they could barely pay their bills — bills that for one couple included "car and RSP payments, wardrobe refreshes, utility bills and something to set aside for when the furnace inevitably conks out. Plus the cost of the sushi, pad Thai and butter chicken that we order in three nights a week-because we're all too tired to cook by the time we get home from work." Nolan wept at their plight.

This point was echoed by The Atlantic's Matt O'Brien earlier this week. Among all but the richest of the rich, they don't see their income/volume increasing as fast as it has in the past. Couple that with the anxiety of having to maintain status, O'Brien argues, and things are rough among the middle-to-lower-upper-upper class. They don't feel rich — but, then, they certainly have no idea what it's like to actually feel poor.

The people we're talking about here aren't just rich people. They're political rich people. It's like the members of Congress who insisted they needed their salaries during the October shutdown — Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, who had to make payments on his "nice house"; Rep. Renee Ellmers, who simply needed her paycheck. (Both of whom, we must note, also voted to make the shutdown happen.) The idea of a public servant griping about his service is at best unseemly.

And at worst it's gross. The New York Times ran a detailed report on Friday about the long-term unemployed, shut off of unemployment insurance support in December and frustrated ever since. "I’m out there working these [part-time, retail] jobs, meeting people and trying to make something happen," Ivy-League-grad-and-Masters-degree-holding Abe Gorelick told the paper. "But it is exhausting. It is stressful. It is difficult." The Senate has repeatedly introduced legislation to reinstate the insurance support; the House, where Ellmers and Terry and Moran work, has not adopted the proposal.

Politicians go to great pains to show how down they are with the average Joe, the working man. And perhaps we've underestimated the extent to which they do. After all, if they think $170,000 is too low a salary to get by, or that half-a-million-dollars-a-year is a middle class salary — if they think, in other words, that the wealthy are actually middle class folks — then Congress has indeed done an excellent job in improving the lot of the middle class.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.