Your meaningless statistic of the day, brought to us courtesy of the author, one Ezra Klein:
And in the aggregate, of course, the business community spends much more than the unions — in 2010, business groups spent $1.3 billion, while unions spent $93 million.
This is one of those statistics we will see over and over and over that turns out to be just another myth of community-based reality. Why? Just follow the link directly above and see the prominently displayed disclaimer(emphasis mine):
The broadest categories that CRP uses to analyze the contributors of campaign cash are shown below. Business interests as a whole contribute far more money to candidates and political parties than do labor unions or ideological groups. Of course, business is a much bigger category than the others. However, business contributions tend to be overstated. Because CRP uses employer/occupation information to categorize donors, and because just about everyone works for a business, contributions from members of labor unions and ideological groups are often classified under business.
So, for example, a GM union worker's contribution gets classified as a business contribution. Then doesn't that sort of thing render that category somewhat meaningless as a measure of "business contributions"?
Looking beyond bullshit artists and their meaningless statistics, further efforts at national campaign finance reform are doomed to fail because they are treating the symptom and not the disease. It's like giving a man with lung cancer a cough suppressant.
The problem is not money in politics, that's just the symptom. The disease is the enormous and growing power of the federal government to tax, spend, and increasingly regulate huge sectors of society. Of course people are going to want to influence those things, and they will spend money to do that. The more powerful the government, the more money that will be spent to influence that government. It's not rocket science.
You want to reduce the influence of campaign contributions? First, reapply the 10th Amendment limits to the role of the federal government. Then dramatically simplify the tax code. Finally, end all payolasubsidies to industries and the pernicious market distortions that they create. Do those three things and we really would clean up government.
Hahaha...I know. It's almost like the politicians aren't sincere about that in the first place.
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