The Federal Election Commission bumped up the limit for individual donations to candidates from $2900 to $3300 in February 2023.
Anybody know why these non-round numbers are used for limits? Other limits (here’s a handy chart) are the more expected $5,000 or $10,000.
Your chart tells you. The limits are raised periodically to keep up with inflation. That won’t produce round numbers.
At least the round a little. $3,294 would be awkward.
The way things are going with this court and its love of corruption, I doubt that a limit of any amount will be around much longer.
But why not go from, say, $2000 to $2500 to $3000? Going up $400 from $2900 is a 13.79% raise. That might be a rounding up of the actual 12.4% CPI raise to the next hundred, but they could save a lot of grief by just going up a set amount that will work for several campaigns.
Tying the increases to inflation is saving grief, because it’s objective.
“Just going up a set amount” means somebody has to decide what that amount is, then justify their decision.
Minimum wage is a great example of something that should go up with inflation and does not. Lots of grief spilled over that as a result.
In some states (such as here in Oregon), minimum wage does go up with inflation.
True! I was thinking of federal minimum wage specifically, which hasn’t changed in something like fifteen years.