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0 pointsroenxi1y ago0 comments

Where are you getting these numbers from?

I was looking at https://www.opensecrets.org/industries because this site inspired me, it suggest finance/insurance/real estate spent $1,249,076,508 so far in the 2024 election cycle which seems a lot more plausible than $50 million. The risk-reward here suggests industries should be pumping billions into elections. The payoffs for regulatory capture are huge and the crypto people are novices compared to anyone else in finance.

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qqqult1y ago· 1 in thread

forgot to include the link, I was looking at PAC donations by industry on the same website: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...

I agree with you on the risk/reward of buying influence through donations

roenxiOP1y ago

OpenSecrets doesn't make it as easy as it could to analyse all this, but I suspect what that is really telling us is that most of the money doesn't enter the race through PACs. Super PACs [0] seem to be different [1] and bring in about 2x as much money. So I don't think the industry PACs are giving a clear an impression of where money is coming from.

My guess is the crypto community isn't outstanding in terms of spend as much as being naive about how to get the money to politicians in a way that gets them the regulation they want. And the players in this game might put some effort into subtlety.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs

[1] The Make America Great Again Super PAC is ~80 million but the largest on the PAC list is American Crystal Sugar at ~$2 million.

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