This week, a California government agency released a hyperbolic screed against money in politics, bemoaning the fact that in the past nine years candidates raised about $1 billion to fund their campaigns.
That figure prompted a rant from the Ross Johnson, the chairman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission:
“The $1,006,638,463 directly raised by officeholders and candidates works out to $344,503 per day or $14,354 per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and this doesn’t even include the more than $110 million spent on their behalf in so-called ‘Independent Expenditures!'”
According to BNA’s Money & Politics Report:
The report, “The Billion Dollar Money Train,” examines how officeholders and candidates have circumvented the 2000 ballot measure, Proposition 34, to raise the money. Proposition 34 limited contributions to legislative candidates at $3,000 per contributor or $6,000 from a small contributor political action committee, contributions to statewide candidates other than gubernatorial candidates at $5,000 or $10,000 from a small contributor PAC, and contributions to gubernatorial candidates at $20,000 regardless of the source.
The limits have gone up every two years since the law went into effect, and are now capped at $3,900 per contributor or $7,800 per small contributor PAC for legislative candidates, $6,500 per contributor or $12,900 per small contributor PAC for non-gubernatorial statewide candidates, and $25,900 per contributor for gubernatorial candidates.
The Los Angeles Times followed up with a scathing editorial, “Politics — that’s where the money is.”
Under the logic of so-called campaign finance reformers, special interest money is any money that politicians raise from any source — whether it’s a company, an association, a union or an average individual. It’s all dirty, special interest money and we should get rid of all of it and replace it with the good kind of money – you know, the manna that comes from the government; the money that is taken from people by force. Voluntarily donated money is bad; forcibly extracted money is good. Get it?
The hysterical doom and gloom in the report about money in politics — and the utter lack of context and understanding about the scope of the money involved — is reminiscent of a scene from the Bond satire film Austin Powers.
The villain, Dr. Evil, is discussing how much ransom to ask the U.S. government to ward off a nuclear attack.
“… we hold the world ransom for one million dollars!” he boasts. An advisor points out that some corporations earn billions of dollars a year, and that even a billion dollars isn’t that much money. The FPPC could use its own Number Two to point out how ridiculous their wailing about money in politics is.
The money so bitterly condemned in the report is a pittance compared to other industries in California, and represents the cost of participating in our democratic process – campaigns require money to spread their message to voters.
The money represents an amount equal to approximately .001 percent of general state spending in that time, or about one-quarter of the budget of the University of California Santa Cruz (the second smallest campus in the state university system). or about the net worth of the two wealthiest members of the California Congressional delegation — Jane Harmon and Darrell Issa. It’s about .0013 percent of the “stimulus” package passed by Congress and the Obama administration, or about the direct budgetary cost of two weeks of military action in Iraq, or about .025 percent of spending on pet products in 2008. How horrible.
