NEW REPORT: Billionaires Are Buying the 2024 Election
Americans for Tax Fairness released a report documenting over $600 million in political spending by 50 billionaire families.
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If this doesn’t piss you off, we don’t know what will.
A new report released today by Americans for Tax Fairness shines a light on the obscene amount of influence billionaire families are wielding over our politics.
DemCast created a social media toolkit based on the key findings in the report. This is an important moment to beat the drum in favor of a billionaire tax and campaign finance reform! Please share a post or two across social channels:
Key Findings of the Report, from Americans for Tax Fairness
The 50 billionaire families who had injected the most money into the political system as of May 9 donated at least $600 million to political parties, political action committees (PACs) and super PACs.
Over two-thirds (69%) of the money has been in support of Republican candidates, less than a quarter (23%) has backed Democratic candidates, and the remaining 8% can’t be classified on a partisan basis.
Even among these top 50 spending families, donations are highly concentrated: the top ten clans–including prominent conservative families the Kochs, Mellons and Waltons–have contributed over half the total ($359 million).
The 50 billionaire mega-donor families in the study are collectively worth over $1 trillion, meaning the $600 million they’ve spent on politics only equals 0.06% of their total wealth. The equivalent donation for the average household would be about $100, so these 50 billionaire families alone have the political-spending capacity of over 6 million ordinary American families.
The total political spending by these 50 families is undoubtedly higher than shown here. In order to focus on the kind of big donors who expect their money to buy them influence, only contributions of $10,000 or more were included. Because of campaign finance limits, that minimum excludes donations directly to candidates. Also, billionaires can impact elections through unlimited contributions to so-called “dark money” groups that don’t reveal their donors and are therefore not included in these totals.
The political free-spending of billionaire families is only possible because of a broken campaign-finance system; and is facilitated by the ineffective taxation of billionaires and of billionaire inheritances, which leave economic dynasties with plenty of spare cash to try to influence elections.
Campaign finance rules should be reformed to outlaw the unlimited political contributions that give billionaire families an outsized say in our political process. Special taxes should be enacted to tax billionaire wealth or at least all the income from their wealth, and the estate tax should be strengthened to curb the growth of economic dynasties.
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It’s happening all the way down to the local level…state reps getting ‘paid’ to push through harmful legislation such as the SAFE Act in Ohio. It’s not hard to find the info (https://www.opensecrets.org/).