I’ve always wondered why candidates need so much money. I mean, this doesn’t go directly into their pockets, it’s largely used to fund ads, right?
I have a pet theory about political ads that I would love to find data to be able to confirm/deny. My theory is that those political ads don’t actually convince anyone about who to vote for, and aren’t intended to. Instead, it’s about convincing the people who already support you and your party to show up and vote. If that’s true, then the root cause of all of this money being injected into politics is really a symptom of low voter turnout. And so anything we can do to improve voter turnout will lessen the influence of money in politics.
My justification for this theory is that I see all of these political ads and really don’t find them convincing or liable to change my vote. I actually find attack ads often have the opposite effect on me, where I am immediately skeptical of whatever claim they advance and feel sure there’s important context they are leaving out. Of course I know I’m not the average voter, and other people may see it differently, but I’d love to see some data on this.
This depends on the ad. Professional political analysts make it a job to understand whether they need to increase voter turnout, convince fence-sitting voters, etc, and shape ads that target those demographics.
Low voter turnout is much more of a problem in the US where voting isn't compulsory.
It's like with commercial advertising. It only needs to influence enough people, whether it convinces them to buy (or vote) what they already wanted, or it convinces them to want that.
I think you may be taking for granted the political dupoloy and candidate equality.
Third-party candidates are almost always unknown and remain unknown to the public, because they have no money to advertise and achieve name recognition, get their message out. The pay-to-play nature of elections preserves the duopoly of the major parties.
Consider also primary campaigns: typically an incumbent has vastly more money to spend than challengers, who are again usually unknown.
When it comes to general election campaigns between two duopolist candidates, there is usually less of a difference in fundraising ability, so it may seem like money doesn't matter a lot. I see campaign donations as more of an entrance fee than a guarantee of victory. It's gatekeeping, where the gates are closed to any politician who can't be purchased by wealthy interests.
The passing of Dolly Parton has really had me thinking how much good these unfathomably rich people and corporations could do. It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.
What's really interesting is when you look at how much good they could do without ever actually affecting their lifestyle at all. What actually is $100 million to a trillionaire? What could he do with 1,000,000,000,000 that he can't do with 999,900,000,000?
The problem with this logic is that it equally applies to someone who owns 999,900,000,000.
If someone is willing to spend money above some spendable threshold, then they will never become a trillionaire. Because they will start giving away sooner.
From one perspective I am not against lobbying in general.
The idea is that legislator don't have the full context and don't know the impact of their work - so they welcome industry or matter experts. Which is quite reasonable. I would argue that the job of the legislator is to know what they are doing, but I can see it being hard for specific technical issues that really benefits from first hand experience.
I am not even particularly against the idea of donating money to make sure a particular issue is known to the public, so that the public can make an effective voting decision.
But all of this seems quite too much.
Companies have disproportionate amount of money to donate and much less synchronization issue that citizen.
Yeah, I don't mind walmart making a psa about theft if that's what they want to do with their money. I very much do have a problem with them putting their thumb on the scale and donating millions to one political candidate over another.
You want to hire a lobbyist to show up and educate a senator on soybean production, more power to you, but it shouldn't come with a check.
The issue is that lobbying puts the power in the hands of the one that has the most money. Yes, politicians should hear out expert opinions when discussing policy matters because nobody knows everything. However with lobbying, the only people that get a voice are the ones paying the most.
Combine that with these megacorps with infinitely deep pockets, it becomes extremely hard to hear both sides of an issue, and we end up in the opposite of the original issue, where the only context legislators get is the context paid for by monied interests.
It's blatant bribery. I come from a 3rd world country where bribery takes the form of slipping a cop or judge some cash to let you off the hook, and in my mind this is in no way different. Hell, it's maybe even worse because we pretend it isn't blatant corruption and is somehow recognized as okay!
Lobbying is legalise bribery, plain and simple. You pay money to get politicians to return the favor in terms of regulations and policies that benifit you (even if they are harmful to the general public)
> Interestingly, the NASDAQ over the same time has also grown 40%.
There is an argument to be made that quantitative easing produces more asset-price inflation than consumer-price inflation in economies where wealth is concentrated at the top (and the new money also mostly goes there).
That could help explain why the massive QE programs after 2008 in both the US and Europe coincided with unexpectedly low consumer-price inflation but large increases in stock, bond, and property prices.
In a way, stocks and property are just consumer products for (relatively) rich people.
Good point, the endless growth means comical amounts of money at the top.
It feels like they discovered in 2008 that you just never let the stock market go down. Then corporations have endless funds and excess can flow freely into politics.
They just have to convince everyone the market going up is good for the average person. The big problem is most people can't afford to invest so they don't give a shit what it does.
Fortunately they are creating a $1000 investment account for all newborns so everyone will be addicted to the market remaining green from birth.
Except in your world the person with the most resources is the one that wins by default because they simply outspend everyone else, how is that righteous? Especially when we're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about corporations.
Besides your premise is flawed to begin with, you most certainly cannot freely rent out a billboard and put anything you want on there, or a radio ad, or a book printing. Restrictions on content already exist, and I see no reason why an exception should be made for political parties.
You shouldn't have the right to spend disproportionately more on influencing an election than other people. That's not democratic. It very much favors the interests of the extremely wealthy.
What would be most democratic is if tax money funded campaigns. Every candidate gets the same amount for that office. Take money out of the equation. It should not be a reason someone gets elected. That's corrupting and makes candidates beholden to monied interests.
> You shouldn't have the right to spend disproportionately more on influencing an election than other people
The 1st amendment freedom of the press is by nature disproportionate!
Most citizens do not own a printing press. Most presses aren't upstream of a national distribution network. Not all twitter accounts have millions of followers. "Evenness of influence" is not constitutionally guaranteed or even a natural outcome, even in a democracy.
The 1st amendment doesn't guarantee you access to the most power communications equipment and audience, only that that the Government won't suppress what you manage to obtain.
A lot of very effective democracies work better by making it so that one individual is does not have a disproportionately larger voice, so the idea that you can spend arbitrary amounts on speech just because it's speech doesn't really follow.
That's a tough ask of a court where half its members (including the chief justice) were caught not only accepting lavish gifts from wealthy individuals who brought cases before the court, but where the outrage was that the gifts were merely undisclosed.
> "It's part and parcel to a system that fully embraces free speech," said Tom Garrett, a vice president at the Institute for Free Speech. "All Americans have the right to express themselves and exercise their right to political speech to the fullest extent possible."
If this was implemented, it would destroy almost all companies. Grocery store net profit margins are 2-4%, if they sell $1B and make $40M and you tax them on 25% of $1B, their loss for the year would be $210M.
Apple and NVidia might survive, but any company with profit margins less than 25% or so would lose money simply by operating.
Liquidating everything or selling the business outright is the only move if you lose money by operating your business, only everyone else is trying to liquidate their assets since operating a business is guaranteed to lose money so there are no buyers.
"Money is speech" is a reddit-ism. The argument is closer to "limiting spending can be tantamount to limiting speech."
Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?
If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.
Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?
> Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it?
I don't think this is a good argument, because it's oddly specific. You can't trust a bad President to properly enforce any law. That much should be clear right now. A bad President is a general danger to the country and to the world. Among other powers, the President is the commander-in-chief!
Of course Congress has the power to impeach and remove a bad President, so you don't get a bad President without also having a bad Congress. In other words, we'd have much bigger problems than campaign finance. And I would claim that we get a bad President and a bad Congress precisely because we have no campaign finance limitations anymore.
I agree in spirit, but if not courts, and government, who is the one who gets to decide on it? Since it's a democratic country, if people disagreed or had a strong opinion about it, then would've voted accordingly.
When was it put up to a vote? I don't recall many national elections where I was asked my opinion about issues, only to choose between two options. And most of the time between one option really.
Entrenched power is leveraged to further entrench power. No way such a bill would have gotten through Congress, even before Citizens United. But is that democracy?
Free speech is when I scream so loud, no one else can even be heard. Its your fault anyway. Maybe if you cared you should have spent your life learning how to scream louder.
Corporations are only people when it comes to rights and profits. When it comes to responsibilities they revert to being nebulous entities whose behaviors are emergent phenomena that no one can actually be held accountable for. Or, to borrow the old maxim, "Corporations aren't people until Texas executes one."
Didn’t down vote, but it was a good idea because the government in citizens united was arguing the FEC (and therefore by extension the president) should have the power to preemptively restrict political speech that mentions a candidate within months of an election. I would think given the current state of American politics, the downsides of allowing Trump to suppress all political messaging about him in the months leading up to an election if it was paid for with “corporate” money to be obvious.
But more than that, among the organizations on the side of citizens united and against the government in that case were the ACLU and the AFL-CIO. When the civil liberties people and the unions are all on the same side of an issue as the conservative pundits against the federal government, there’s a very good chance the government is very much in the wrong.
I think the idea that we should also be able to hide our large donations started here, but got reenforced by later decisions. ok, it's your money, you get to send it to whoever you like. but you shouldn't be able to hide. companies shouldn't act as cover for their owners, and if a candidate is largely propped up by the billionaire class then shouldn't voters at least be aware? shouldn't we be allowed to connect the dots and say 'wow, so you're removing protection for these wetlands because this guy threw you a couple million to get elected'?
the problem is that CU is a way for rich people to get around the limits on individual political contributions (which were designed to prevent the rich from having a lot more influence than regular citizens over the voting process)
I’ve always wondered why candidates need so much money. I mean, this doesn’t go directly into their pockets, it’s largely used to fund ads, right?
I have a pet theory about political ads that I would love to find data to be able to confirm/deny. My theory is that those political ads don’t actually convince anyone about who to vote for, and aren’t intended to. Instead, it’s about convincing the people who already support you and your party to show up and vote. If that’s true, then the root cause of all of this money being injected into politics is really a symptom of low voter turnout. And so anything we can do to improve voter turnout will lessen the influence of money in politics.
My justification for this theory is that I see all of these political ads and really don’t find them convincing or liable to change my vote. I actually find attack ads often have the opposite effect on me, where I am immediately skeptical of whatever claim they advance and feel sure there’s important context they are leaving out. Of course I know I’m not the average voter, and other people may see it differently, but I’d love to see some data on this.
I dont think its just ads. This money is the lubricant to mobilize media++, consultans and private networks.
This depends on the ad. Professional political analysts make it a job to understand whether they need to increase voter turnout, convince fence-sitting voters, etc, and shape ads that target those demographics.
Low voter turnout is much more of a problem in the US where voting isn't compulsory.
It's like with commercial advertising. It only needs to influence enough people, whether it convinces them to buy (or vote) what they already wanted, or it convinces them to want that.
I think you may be taking for granted the political dupoloy and candidate equality.
Third-party candidates are almost always unknown and remain unknown to the public, because they have no money to advertise and achieve name recognition, get their message out. The pay-to-play nature of elections preserves the duopoly of the major parties.
Consider also primary campaigns: typically an incumbent has vastly more money to spend than challengers, who are again usually unknown.
When it comes to general election campaigns between two duopolist candidates, there is usually less of a difference in fundraising ability, so it may seem like money doesn't matter a lot. I see campaign donations as more of an entrance fee than a guarantee of victory. It's gatekeeping, where the gates are closed to any politician who can't be purchased by wealthy interests.
> It also leaves out the $106 million-plus Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent in California fighting a proposed wealth tax and other issues
Damn, I can't think of a better argument for wealth tax if one dude alone is willing to spend $100m to fight it. He clearly has too much.
The passing of Dolly Parton has really had me thinking how much good these unfathomably rich people and corporations could do. It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.
> It enrages me to think of how many people $106 million could have helped.
That money did go somewhere, so it probably did “help” quite a number of people less rich than Sergey Brin.
(That’s just a side comment, not an argument that any single person should own that much money.)
What's really interesting is when you look at how much good they could do without ever actually affecting their lifestyle at all. What actually is $100 million to a trillionaire? What could he do with 1,000,000,000,000 that he can't do with 999,900,000,000?
The problem with this logic is that it equally applies to someone who owns 999,900,000,000.
If someone is willing to spend money above some spendable threshold, then they will never become a trillionaire. Because they will start giving away sooner.
> then they will never become a trillionaire
Good!! No one needs or deserves to be a trillionaire!
[flagged]
Omg great question you're so smart!
the OP comment was idiotic, you're also probably not going to be splitting at the atom any time soon.
Thanks John Roberts!
It’s been turtles all the way down since the Citizens United decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
From one perspective I am not against lobbying in general.
The idea is that legislator don't have the full context and don't know the impact of their work - so they welcome industry or matter experts. Which is quite reasonable. I would argue that the job of the legislator is to know what they are doing, but I can see it being hard for specific technical issues that really benefits from first hand experience.
I am not even particularly against the idea of donating money to make sure a particular issue is known to the public, so that the public can make an effective voting decision.
But all of this seems quite too much.
Companies have disproportionate amount of money to donate and much less synchronization issue that citizen.
Yeah, I don't mind walmart making a psa about theft if that's what they want to do with their money. I very much do have a problem with them putting their thumb on the scale and donating millions to one political candidate over another.
You want to hire a lobbyist to show up and educate a senator on soybean production, more power to you, but it shouldn't come with a check.
The issue is that lobbying puts the power in the hands of the one that has the most money. Yes, politicians should hear out expert opinions when discussing policy matters because nobody knows everything. However with lobbying, the only people that get a voice are the ones paying the most.
Combine that with these megacorps with infinitely deep pockets, it becomes extremely hard to hear both sides of an issue, and we end up in the opposite of the original issue, where the only context legislators get is the context paid for by monied interests.
It's blatant bribery. I come from a 3rd world country where bribery takes the form of slipping a cop or judge some cash to let you off the hook, and in my mind this is in no way different. Hell, it's maybe even worse because we pretend it isn't blatant corruption and is somehow recognized as okay!
Lobbying is legalise bribery, plain and simple. You pay money to get politicians to return the favor in terms of regulations and policies that benifit you (even if they are harmful to the general public)
This is how democracies die.
Article says that there is an increase of 40% from 2024 to 2026 for political donations.
Interestingly, the NASDAQ over the same time has also grown 40%.
> Interestingly, the NASDAQ over the same time has also grown 40%.
There is an argument to be made that quantitative easing produces more asset-price inflation than consumer-price inflation in economies where wealth is concentrated at the top (and the new money also mostly goes there).
That could help explain why the massive QE programs after 2008 in both the US and Europe coincided with unexpectedly low consumer-price inflation but large increases in stock, bond, and property prices.
In a way, stocks and property are just consumer products for (relatively) rich people.
Good point, the endless growth means comical amounts of money at the top.
It feels like they discovered in 2008 that you just never let the stock market go down. Then corporations have endless funds and excess can flow freely into politics.
They just have to convince everyone the market going up is good for the average person. The big problem is most people can't afford to invest so they don't give a shit what it does.
Fortunately they are creating a $1000 investment account for all newborns so everyone will be addicted to the market remaining green from birth.
"Citizens United" turned "one man, one vote" into "one dollar, one vote"
It must be overturned. It was a bogus ruling.
> It must be overturned. It was a bogus ruling.
Don't I have a right to buy a $10 yard sign? A $100 bard sign? A $1000 billboard? A $10K radio ad? A $50K book printing?
Why should I lose any of these rights because I join with others to help me afford it?
Except in your world the person with the most resources is the one that wins by default because they simply outspend everyone else, how is that righteous? Especially when we're not talking about individuals here, we're talking about corporations.
Besides your premise is flawed to begin with, you most certainly cannot freely rent out a billboard and put anything you want on there, or a radio ad, or a book printing. Restrictions on content already exist, and I see no reason why an exception should be made for political parties.
The issue is "Is a corporation a person with all rights assigned to people"
Makes me wonder if LLM's are going to be granted citizenship by this court.
And then, individual transistors.
You shouldn't have the right to spend disproportionately more on influencing an election than other people. That's not democratic. It very much favors the interests of the extremely wealthy.
What would be most democratic is if tax money funded campaigns. Every candidate gets the same amount for that office. Take money out of the equation. It should not be a reason someone gets elected. That's corrupting and makes candidates beholden to monied interests.
> You shouldn't have the right to spend disproportionately more on influencing an election than other people
The 1st amendment freedom of the press is by nature disproportionate!
Most citizens do not own a printing press. Most presses aren't upstream of a national distribution network. Not all twitter accounts have millions of followers. "Evenness of influence" is not constitutionally guaranteed or even a natural outcome, even in a democracy.
The 1st amendment doesn't guarantee you access to the most power communications equipment and audience, only that that the Government won't suppress what you manage to obtain.
A lot of very effective democracies work better by making it so that one individual is does not have a disproportionately larger voice, so the idea that you can spend arbitrary amounts on speech just because it's speech doesn't really follow.
That's a tough ask of a court where half its members (including the chief justice) were caught not only accepting lavish gifts from wealthy individuals who brought cases before the court, but where the outrage was that the gifts were merely undisclosed.
[dead]
> "It's part and parcel to a system that fully embraces free speech," said Tom Garrett, a vice president at the Institute for Free Speech. "All Americans have the right to express themselves and exercise their right to political speech to the fullest extent possible."
Corporations are people, my friend.
> Corporations are people, my friend.
Then maybe we should start taxing them like people...
File the 1040 take only the standard deduction no matter your income. Revenue, not profit, is your income. Etc.
> Revenue, not profit, is your income.
If this was implemented, it would destroy almost all companies. Grocery store net profit margins are 2-4%, if they sell $1B and make $40M and you tax them on 25% of $1B, their loss for the year would be $210M.
Apple and NVidia might survive, but any company with profit margins less than 25% or so would lose money simply by operating.
Liquidating everything or selling the business outright is the only move if you lose money by operating your business, only everyone else is trying to liquidate their assets since operating a business is guaranteed to lose money so there are no buyers.
I agree. So stop treating corporations like people. It doesn't make any sense.
Money is not speech, no matter what the courts say.
"Money is speech" is a reddit-ism. The argument is closer to "limiting spending can be tantamount to limiting speech."
Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?
If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.
Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?
> Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it?
I don't think this is a good argument, because it's oddly specific. You can't trust a bad President to properly enforce any law. That much should be clear right now. A bad President is a general danger to the country and to the world. Among other powers, the President is the commander-in-chief!
Of course Congress has the power to impeach and remove a bad President, so you don't get a bad President without also having a bad Congress. In other words, we'd have much bigger problems than campaign finance. And I would claim that we get a bad President and a bad Congress precisely because we have no campaign finance limitations anymore.
I agree in spirit, but if not courts, and government, who is the one who gets to decide on it? Since it's a democratic country, if people disagreed or had a strong opinion about it, then would've voted accordingly.
When was it put up to a vote? I don't recall many national elections where I was asked my opinion about issues, only to choose between two options. And most of the time between one option really.
Entrenched power is leveraged to further entrench power. No way such a bill would have gotten through Congress, even before Citizens United. But is that democracy?
Free speech is when I scream so loud, no one else can even be heard. Its your fault anyway. Maybe if you cared you should have spent your life learning how to scream louder.
Corporations are only people when it comes to rights and profits. When it comes to responsibilities they revert to being nebulous entities whose behaviors are emergent phenomena that no one can actually be held accountable for. Or, to borrow the old maxim, "Corporations aren't people until Texas executes one."
Citizens United is possibly the worst SCOTUS decision ever, on par with Dred Scott and Plessy v Fergeson. Abomination.
maybe the downvotes should instead state their arguments as to why Citizens United is a good idea
Didn’t down vote, but it was a good idea because the government in citizens united was arguing the FEC (and therefore by extension the president) should have the power to preemptively restrict political speech that mentions a candidate within months of an election. I would think given the current state of American politics, the downsides of allowing Trump to suppress all political messaging about him in the months leading up to an election if it was paid for with “corporate” money to be obvious.
But more than that, among the organizations on the side of citizens united and against the government in that case were the ACLU and the AFL-CIO. When the civil liberties people and the unions are all on the same side of an issue as the conservative pundits against the federal government, there’s a very good chance the government is very much in the wrong.
I think the idea that we should also be able to hide our large donations started here, but got reenforced by later decisions. ok, it's your money, you get to send it to whoever you like. but you shouldn't be able to hide. companies shouldn't act as cover for their owners, and if a candidate is largely propped up by the billionaire class then shouldn't voters at least be aware? shouldn't we be allowed to connect the dots and say 'wow, so you're removing protection for these wetlands because this guy threw you a couple million to get elected'?
the problem is that CU is a way for rich people to get around the limits on individual political contributions (which were designed to prevent the rich from having a lot more influence than regular citizens over the voting process)