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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

A billion dollars is nothing in an economy of 325 million people. That’s half of what Colgate-Palmolive spends each year advertising toothpaste and dish soap. It’s about three days of Google ad revenue.

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?

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The only reason they spend that on advertising is because of their ROI. The people funding the super pacs aren't just giving their money away without some kind of return.

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.

Right. And that means the return must be shit, because Colgate-Palmolive finds it worth its while to spend twice as much moneg advertising toothpaste and dish soap as all the wealthy individuals and companies in the country find it worth their while to invest in political advertising.

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.

Can you cite a source for that? This anecdotal but my impression has been that self-funded candidates do not do especially well in elections. Mike Huffington's run against Diane Feinstein was a failure [0] despite committing an enormous about of his money to the campaign. Also, the Koch Brothers' direct spending on elections has similarly not been especially effective according to some accounts. [1]

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...

I think the problem is that when 100 million people contribute $10 to a cause they basically don't get heard but one person contributing the same amount will have all doors opened and be listened to.

We’re talking about PAC spend, which doesn’t go directly to candidates. A billion in small donations to an issue-focused PAC is indistinguishable to a single $1 billion donation. It’s a billion dollars available to conduct advertising for the issue.

100 million people motivated enough to contribute $10 each to a cause indicates a huge base of support. It's not just the money, it's a signal of engagement.

Don't you think that someone tells the candidates where the PAC money is coming from?

> We’re talking about PAC spend, which doesn’t go directly to candidates. A billion in small donations to an issue-focused PAC is indistinguishable to a single $1 billion donation. It’s a billion dollars available to conduct advertising for the issue.

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.

See: https://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/what-happens...

> 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.

I know you're just using rhetoric and not thinking about those numbers carefully, but I think that if 100 million people contributed $10 to a single cause, that cause would run the table in American politics.

A logical problem here is that a 100 million people would be far more than enough to decide any and all elections. They could put 'Mr. Cause' into office at every single level of government if there was ever anything like 100 million people willing to agree on something and put forth the modicum of effort required to show up at a polling place. No money necessary.

Maybe I got my numbers wrong. How about 1 million people donating $5 vs one person donating 5 dollars? Don't you think that the one person will get the opportunity to raise their issues to the people in power?

Sure the one person will.

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.

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