what exactly is it?
and, if we have this huge surplus, why don’t they use it to pay back the social security fund which has been borrowd from for years?
soft money is money donated to political parties via a “non-official” holding group. Federal law prohibits companies from donating money to candidates or parties directly. It also limits individual donations to , I believe, $1000 per year. To get around this pesky law and buy the candidates of their choice, bigwigs give $$ to groups that are not “officially” part of the fundraising
groups of the parties. This cash is usually channeled to state groups and used for national candidates.
THere isn’t a huge surplus (well, there is as far as a lot of people are concerned, myself included).
“Soft money” is a term for money donated to a political party that isn’t used to advocate the election of a candidate. It’s supposed to go towards neutral activities like sponsoring voter registration, conducting polls, disseminating general information, etc, but in many cases the activities being funded are designed to direct votes towards a candidate. The advantage of soft money is that there are fewer restrictions on the amounts that can be donated. I’m not sure if you’re implying this by your post, but soft money has nothing to do with social security or government revenue.
Soft money is bills. See you can fold it and put it in your pocket because it’s made from paper.
Hard money is coins (copper, nickel & other metals).
Hope this helps.
The Center for Responsive Politics explains it here:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pubs/glossary/softmoney.htm
Their site lets you search for soft (and hard) money donors and figure out how much money they donated.
Soft money is can be as benign as a “get out the vote” campaign, or as virulent as a “get out the vote campaign in North Carolina” which is considered by some to be a blatantly partisan gesture.
Soft money, while more difficult to track, is recorded to some extent through http://www.opensecrets.org. Unfortunately, opensecrets is one of the more bandwidth heavy sites on the web (don’t even try to print a page), so I’ll only suggest you hit the “soft money” link, which is hidden somewhere on that site.
T-1 dopers are appreciated for further direction.
Thank you, Boris, for reading my mind.
The trouble with trying to ban soft money is that the money pays for “issue ads,” in which issues are discussed instead of particular candidates. Of course, certain candidates will be on the correct side of those issues, but we can’t help that.
The First Amendment wasn’t designed explicitly to allow pornography, that’s a side effect (it’s covered in the penumbra of the First Amendment). What the FA was explicitly designed to allow is the free discussion of political ideas, and that’s exactly what soft money pays for. If I want to contribute my time and money to advocate the issues that are important to me, you can’t stop me. Any attempt to limit soft money donations will run into serious conflicts with the First Amendment, and I predict will be invalidated by the courts.
CurtC
I thought it was supposed to be “hear, hear” (as in hear what that guy is saying).
No, sailor, I wanted someone to see me and throw me the ball.
You’re write…my bad.