Yes, it does make it a bad idea. Because as the cited paper shows, as well as books like the new one by the reporter Jane Mayer called Dark Money, the methods by which money is used to support the interests of the 1% run deep and form an intricate web that is mostly unseen but extremely effective, encompassing not just the political system but the entire information infrastructure of society. The Koch brothers, for example, currently fund somewhere between 200 to 300 college programs that they call their “talent pipeline” – a process designed to turn out young people with the correct conservative values and thought processes. So you’ve got the Kochs and their ilk supporting a vast network of astroturf organizations, influencing media including David Koch’s major involvement in PBS which would normally be the last bastion of independence and freedom from commercialization, and engaged in a long-term program of Orwellian brainwashing in educational institutions – and that’s just for starters. So yeah, it’s a lot more than just a little campaign spending, as insidious as that is by itself.
No circular reasoning. The point wasn’t about Hillary, the point was made in the previous sentence that you omitted to quote – that the proof of the vast influence of money in politics is the plain fact of the political system that you have and whose interests it obviously serves, to an extent not seen in any other democracy in the world. There’s a reason you don’t have universal health care and probably never will in any foreseeable future. There’s a reason that Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, and some multinationals paid no taxes at all.
You may not agree that the evidence is abundant, but many people in a position to know say you’re wrong. Here’s part of how a recent interview with Jane Mayer wrapped up: The Kochs announced plans to spend something like $889 million in 2016.
Well, they’ve now revised it, they’ve said now maybe just $750 million. (laughs)
Then I feel better about everything. How desperately should we be despairing the state of American democracy?
Listen, I think money is a tremendous problem in American politics at this point. I think you’d have to be blind not to see that and you don’t have to be a partisan-anything to see that. I quote Mark McKinnon at the end of the book, who’s a Republican advisor to George W. Bush, says, “Let’s call it what it is. This is an oligarchy, it’s devised by people who benefit from the system. So that they can continue to benefit from the system.” And that’s Mark McKinnon talking.
What is the yield of this “vast influence of money in politics”? Can you define it better? That seems quite nebulous in a way you can characterize anything as supporting your position. In fact, you did - you hold up as proof that this exists because the US has a political system it does. It can’t be because people want it that way, no, it must be the “vast influence of money in politics”!
It’s pretty easy to imagine a low income person who would support ultra low taxes that would disproportionately benefit the 1% - do you hold this as evidence that there is “vast influence of money in politics”? That’s a giant stretch.
Because they like jobs? And because even though many tax cuts disproportionately benefit the 1%, they also benefit the bottom? Such as lower capital gains rates, which benefit small investors as well as large investors. If the capital gains rate was the same as your income tax rate, then it would be awfully hard for a poor person to save and invest and actually get anywhere.
Still riding the excluded middle train I see. People who don’t agree with me - are they stupid or misinformed? Not agreeing is evidence of one or both! How utterly ridiculous.
Sure. Hundreds of studies have laid out the basic scenario on the vast and rapidly growing income gap. One gets some perspective of the approximate yield of the oligarchy gaming the system from that kind of presentation. The question is, when the feds collect income taxes which amount to just over $2 trillion a year, the majority of it personal income taxes, how much money are they leaving on the table for the unproductive benefit of the 1% and their corporations and to the detriment of everyone else – who have to suffer the combination of taxes that truly impact them along with the debilitating effects of growing government debt and lesser government services? Maybe as much as a trillion dollars a year, certainly many hundreds of billions.
Yes, people would naturally want to be on the losing end of growing wealth inequality and must be thrilled to see their share of the wealth dropping, just like everyone greatly enjoys being gouged by health insurers, paying exorbitant amounts out of pocket despite that, fighting to get claims paid, or having no health insurance at all, or being unable to retire because of worries about health care costs. Everybody loves that. Just like everybody loved the Wall Street criminals making out like bandits prior to the 2008 crash, stealing billions with impunity while ordinary people lost their homes. Yep, everybody wanted it that way.
The most incredible thing is that under the Romney-Ryan budget plan the already growing economic inequalities would have gotten a whole lot worse. And I’m certain that all the yokels who voted for Romney were well aware of that but for some inexplicable reason they definitely wanted it to get a whole lot worse!
The only giant stretch here is the belief that by supporting policies that benefit the 1% the poor person somehow also benefits himself. Despite the facts being the exact opposite, this is what the dogma of the plutocrats incessantly hammered into their heads has got them to believe. I wonder how they come to constantly believe that, year after year, election after election, as they keep getting poorer and the plutocrats keep getting richer. Whatever it is, it couldn’t have anything to do with the influence of money in politics!
If the Democrats didn’t favor so many policies that make the poor poorer, there’d be an easier choice. Increasing energy prices and allowing large numbers of unskilled immigrants into the country makes the poor poorer.
And yet lower-income earners are generally far better off in countries that have much more liberal social policies than even Democrats would ever propose, because among other things they’re supported by strong social services like income and housing and guaranteed health care at the same level as everyone else. Yet these countries also have their fair share of the very wealthy who seem to do quite well even if they support a somewhat more egalitarian and less economically stratified society.
Again, simply stating that the income gap is growing, or that people would have more money in some other scenario - that is not sufficient to demonstrate a “vast influence of money in politics”. First of all, you haven’t defined what that means.
Is it so hard to fathom that a person may base their support not on the direct financial impact to them, but on something else…principles perhaps?
You are measuring benefit on a 1 dimensional scale. Whereas you think a rational person would attempt to maximize wealth, in reality, a person really tries to maximize utility. A person may be so in favor of one non-monetary issue, they are willing to pay more to get it. Principles - is that a strange concept?
A hard core pro-life person may be willing to pay 10s of thousands of dollars more each year if their favored position is advanced. Someone who’s #1 issue is global warming may be willing to pay great amounts of money at great personal sacrifice to move forward their agenda. Even at great cost, these people may take these positions based on their principles, not necessarily because they are being impacted by the vast influence of money in politics. Would you tell that person who votes that way that they are doing it wrong? That they are stupid, or misinformed, or being impacted by the vast influence of money in politics? Sure maybe some people are, but you haven’t demonstrated that, nor have you even defined it.
They won’t be silenced. The David Kochs and Sheldon Adelsons would be able to make their voices heard just like everyone else. It’s just that they couldn’t drown out the voices of ordinary voters like they are now. If you can’t see a difference between a million people donating 25 bucks each to a campaign, and one person writing a check for 25 million to a super PAC, why the former should be encouraged and the latter outlawed, I can’t help you.
Perhaps. But rather than get into a pissing contest about which side tends to be more driven by principle and which side seems to have more obvious pecuniary interests, I’ll point out that this isn’t even necessarily pertinent to the argument. Take the Koch brothers, for instance. I believe that aside from a voracious interest in amassing even more billions, they actually do have principles.
Their principles include a pretty radical form of libertarianism that seeks to minimize government to the point of virtual disappearance, places all trust in private markets and the profit motive and none in government. They believe in essentially no social or public services. They believe that the 19th century robber barons were not robbers but American heroes. They don’t believe in climate change and have utter contempt for environmentalism. They run, as I said earlier, some 200 to 300 college-level programs turning out libertarian clones of themselves that they regard as their long-term “pipeline” to promote and spread the Koch holy doctrine far and wide, long into the future.
Now here’s my question. I may not agree with those ideas, you may or you may not, they may or may not have any social, practical, or moral validity. You and I may have different ideas. But is it appropriate for the Kochs and the Kochs alone to spend a billion dollars just in a single year to push their ideology when you or I cannot, just because they can? Do you not see that giving any single private individual that kind of power over ideas is unhealthy and potentially damaging to the public interest and to a fair and balanced public dialogue? Because if you can’t see this, I’ll just leave it there because there’s nothing more I can say.
In each post, I’ve noted that my objection is to the focus on campaign spending to the near-exclusion of other forms of influence. You then respond by not defending that focus and instead pointing out all the other forms of influence. So it seems like you agree with me that campaign spending is not an especially important means by which wealthy interests manipulate the political process. Is that correct?
Ok. So your position is that the US campaign finance system is the primary driver in determining the effective tax rate on US-based multinationals?
I have no problem in general with any individual spending any amount of money on any legal avenue they wish (not sure how I feel about foreign spending, but that’s not exactly germane). If the Koch folks wanted to spend 1 trillion dollars, go for it. If Bloomberg wants to spend a billion dollars, yay. If you want to buy a $4 cup of coffee, go nuts. Money is speech. Period. Because I support free speech, i have no objection to unlimited spending. That is a principled position.
But according to Bernie Sanders, Citizens United changed everything.
Also, the U.S. effective corporate tax rate is not much different than the average foreign effective tax rate. It’s maybe a little lower, depending on how you measure, but we’re talking about a point or two.
As mentioned upstream, the rise of the “small donor” is cutting into it. Suppose we will soon see some action to prevent the dreadful peril of “donor fraud” by non-citizens.
Still, it is cheering news to hear that all those rich guys are just pissing their money away. Don’t tell them, OK? We’ll just keep this entry noose.
I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with how campaign spending – which is already regulated – ranks with all the other money influences that have been mentioned, and indeed have been well documented. They’re all important.
Whether campaign spending alone is more important than any other single influence I have no idea and don’t really care, nor do I care whether or not Democrats or anyone else is choosing to make a particularly big deal of that one factor, since it’s the whole broad spectrum of the way that money controls political influence that is important. But I will say one thing. IIRC in the last election cycle the presidential campaigns spent about $2 billion and a further $7 billion or so was spent on the Congressional campaigns. That implies a high barrier to entry, and that fact alone doesn’t bode well for a healthy and diverse political system – it suggests one that has to be beholden to major big-money interests like Wall Street. Which is why Hillary caters to them, Republicans are completely owned by them, and Bernie is going to have big trouble challenging them.
Fine, you’re free to believe that. You can even pat yourself on the back and call it a “principled position”. I call it blind, absolutist dogmatism. But it doesn’t matter what I call it, what matters are the consequences, of which your position is recklessly dismissive. If you consider that “money is speech” in a completely unlimited dogmatic sense, then money and money alone will dictate the kind of society you live in and the values that prevail in it, which will – not coincidentally – reflect the values of those with the most money. As indeed it already does.
I also support free speech. Trying to suggest that I don’t is ridiculous and misdirected. I support it very strongly, and perhaps more strongly than you do. Because speech is only one side of the dialogue. Free speech is not just about everyone being able to speak, it’s also about having a decent chance to be heard – about enabling a diversity of opinions instead of only those which money wishes to be heard. Otherwise the freedom to speak is meaningless. Those are principles, too, and they are totally missing from your libertarian world view.
Allowing money to control ideas without limit is not synonymous with freedom – it promotes the establishment of orthodoxy. It can soon become more like an Orwellian world where eventually even thoughts are driven out to the fringes if they don’t conform to the required orthodoxy, like what the Kochs are trying to promulgate with their infiltration of college campuses.
Really? Here, let me refer to my previous posts which have explained my position:
If you don’t care that progressives like Bernie Sanders are unduly focused on a factor that doesn’t matter very much, that’s fine. I can’t force you to care. But I don’t know why you’re debating me if you don’t disagree with the argument I’m making.
I was debating you because way up in post #203 you stated that “it has not yet been well-established that money influences electoral outcomes”. Then for some inexplicable reason you launched into a digression about the narrow issue of campaign spending specifically, something that wasn’t anywhere to be found in what you had quoted me saying, and you have been beating that drum ever since.
I disagree with the statement you made that I just quoted here, simple as that.
Another point I might make is that there’s often confusion about what “campaign finance” actually means. Was Citizens United about “campaign finance”? Technically, no. Practically, yes.
