Billionaires, Not Voters, Are Deciding Elections
truthdig.com
truthdig.com
It was not because billionaires supported it. It failed because it was a terrible idea.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup-re...
If you just look at it through the lens of supply and demand, of course rent control is bad. But the real issues are more nuanced than that.
For example, a recent study from Stanford found that rent control reduces supply of housing by 15% and raises the income you need to move into the city; on the other side, that same study found that rent control helps protect people that live in the city already, which disproportionately helps people of color and lower income people.
There’s a few similar studies. There are definitely tradeoffs here, which depend on your own values.
i.e. if wealthier people can't move in, I'd think there's a good chance the existing wealthy people will move out as well, leaving only the lower income people without any tax base to support the services needed for them.
I would bet that you'd find that this only helps people of color and lower income people in the very short run and that eventually you'd find that these apartments turn into ghettos.
The best way we can help housing is more supply, which in the bay area at least, means higher and denser housing.
Californian here. This statement is true only if 'corporate propaganda hook' means the recommendations of most reputable economists. There's ample evidence that rent control not only reduces housing stock but also fails to help people most in need of assistance. California has a serious housing crisis--there are people living under bridges in my town--but Prop 10 was not the answer. I hope the No vote will force some rethinking about a more comprehensive solution. I predict that proposition would pass by a large majority.
This didn't used to be the case. Money spent used to be one of the most reliable methods of determining who'd win an election. Now voters seem to be voting in ways that are much less predictable.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/despite-record-spend...
The best option would have been to not get here in the first place. To have stopped it when it was easier. But now that power has accumulated so much there is more reason to work for wealth re-distribution.
I also interested to know how much relationship there is between the accumulation of wealth in a few and war. I see that the rise of the far right and the economic inequality are happening at the same time. But I do not know what is the relationship between them. Anyone has data on this?
Why would you do that? The purpose of having countries is to have a limit on where the laws/policies apply to. In this case we're talking specifically about the US.
> Moreover, what would the environmental impact of such a policy be? Will we be consuming way more than what we are currently?
If anything, its likely to be better for the environment. I don't think income equality means that people will just be buying more stuff (although that is likely to happen to a certain extent, just not enough to have meaningful impact); the way it would look is access to better services like healthcare, education etc.
(I'm not saying that there are no fabs anywhere outside China, but if e.g. Germany decides to start WW3, they'll have a hard time producing enough electronic components given the existing foundries in the country.)
It's obvious from history that war is a way for powerful people to accumulate/consolidate power and money
More than a billion dollars. Think about that.
It’s $5 per person of voting age, which is about Facebook’s ad revenue per user in a month. Think about that: has Facebook ever convinced you of anything? Because that’s 12x the advertising intensity of PAC funding.
The causal inference the article draws is insane. California voters rejected more rent control by a 60-40 margin. Facebook can’t convince more than 0.9% of users to even click on each ad, but somehow a fraction of the level of advertising changed peoples’ minds about rent control?
The difference between the two is one I can choose to avoid, the other is affecting who chooses my rights and laws with less focus on the people affected by those decisions and more on the affect to those funding their campaigns.
Put differently, corporate political advertising amounts to about 0.5% of advertising in the US. That tells you a lot about how unimportant it is to companies’ bottom lines. It’s basic arithmetic. These political decisions are worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If corporations invest only a billion influencing them, that means the influence is very attenuated: it only affects votes at the margins.
There are ample reasons to be concerned about the effect of money on the American political system. Personally I am more focused on regulatory capture through lobbying than elections per se. In the current system it looks to me as if billionaires win regardless of who's in office.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Huffington [1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/05/the-koch-brother...
Now, I could be 100% wrong because I'm not looking at any data to back up what I'm stating next but from what I remember what you say above is not 100% true.
From the time the campaign starts until the campaign ends and the election is complete the PAC's $ can not go directly to a candidate. The problem is what happens to / with that money after the campaign is over? From what I've heard that money can go directly to a candidate (or now official-elect) with no strings attached.
Of course, I do not have a citation handy, but I've never heard of leftover PAC $ being reimbursed to those donating nor have I ever heard of candidates or a PAC donating the leftover PAC $ to charity.
> Mostly, it’s up to the super PAC. “Super PACs have fairly broad discretion on what they can do with excess funds,” says Robert Kelner, chair of the Election and Political Law Practice Group at the law firm Covington & Burling. They can transfer them to a charitable organization, use them for wind-down expenses like clearing out offices or filing reports, or pay consulting fees. The main thing they can’t use leftover money for is to make contributions to a candidate for federal office.
But so will the 1 million donating $5 each if they do it through any sort of organization. Have you ever donated to Planned Parenthood? Or the NRA? Or whatever political org you happen to align with?
Those organizations get heard because of the money and votes behind them.
Similarly, this cycle was defined by an overwhelming fundraising advantage for Democrats. The Democrats did well, but they did not do well proportionately to their financial edge. There were races where we just dominated the GOP --- on the field, in the air, with endorsements, and all that backed by money --- and the GOP won anyways. Money helps, but it doesn't "decide" elections.
Rich people with a microphone and groupie followers seem more influential than just monetary donors.