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0 pointsdjhn10y ago0 comments

> Members of Congress spend 70% of their time raising money. They're not lawmakers, they're professional fundraisers.

> they would never get anything done

You will have a hard time convincing HN that what US needs are more laws, especially at a rate limited by time available to politicians for writing them!

Broadly speaking limits on campaign donations are fairly small (Max $5k) and average donation sums ($100-200) are extremely small. You will need anywhere from 2-8 million to run for Congress, about 25 million to run for Senate.

As an entrepreneur, what do you call it when you raise capital of several million from hundreds or thousands of investors? That's right, you call it revenue, and you call those investors your customers.

It's a weird model, but the US system makes a fundraising politician to personally talk to thousands and thousands of his constituents and reach out to 10-fold that figure to gauge interest. That has a significant positive side-effect of the politician being intimately familiar with their biggest concerns and often even smaller, local or personal problems that need fixing. After all, if you want to be a great salesman, you better know the customer very well.

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AlwaysBCoding10y ago

The "limit" on campaign donations is a complete farce though. Let's look at Jeb Bush. Jeb stated multiple times that he wasn't running for president in 2016, and instead started a Super PAC that let him raise uncapped campaign donations, and ultimately raised over $100 million. Then he announces that he had a change of heart, was indeed going to run for president, and gave control of his Super PAC to a friend of his. And now he has $100 million to play with, fuck that $5k limit, and the voters/peasants who would donate it.

djhnOP10y ago

Yes, SuperPACs and presidential races are another beast altogether. Like I said, I was talking about a general case, since you referred to legislators, which by definition excludes presidential candidates.

SuperPACs are difficult to play the devil's advocate for. They are a feature of running a widespread democratic campaign in a big country, where the ad impressions on voters are prohibitively expensive because of said voters purchasing power.

SuperPACs have very lax limits on contribution, but they need to be firewalled from the main campaign and cannot coordinate spending, and their power to target their spending is very limited. As far as I can tell, this firewall is as good as any such structure required by law and audited (e.g. finance, consulting, etc.). That is to say, it works okay, but not great.

Full disclosure, I am involved in campaigning professionally (not US) and was an independent OSCE observer of the 2012 presidential elections in the US when working for my country's parliament.

humanrebar10y ago

> SuperPACs are difficult to play the devil's advocate for.

I'll take a shot. They could be megaphones for oligarchs, sure. But they can also be fledgling political parties. Or at least non-governmental counter-movements within a party. I mean, that's basically what Lessig has been doing, right?

jules10y ago

The $5k limit is irrelevant. PACs can funnel an unlimited amount of money into campaigns as long as they are "independent". Besides, average Joe certainly does not even have $5k to spend on a campaign, so yea if it were true that the $5k limit is relevant then the politician would have to reach out to thousands of rich people. But even that isn't true.

chillwaves10y ago

The government should issue everyone $5k to spend on politics (and only politics), then it would be democratic.

jellicle10y ago

Congratulations, you've invented Larry Lessig's idea. He noted that $50 per voter would be enough to swamp the contributions from the billionaires.

fyolnish10y ago

That's just voting

dangerlibrary10y ago

There is no requirement in the US that your donors are your constituents. Amass sufficiently many people to whom the maximum contribution is a trivial sum of money, and donate to every campaign. Done.

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