{"id":12493,"date":"2015-09-22T06:12:21","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T11:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12493"},"modified":"2015-09-22T06:12:21","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T11:12:21","slug":"yahoo-finance-drops-in-from-mars-to-explain-big-money-hasnt-bought-u-s-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12493","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn\u2019t Bought U.S. Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn\u2019t Bought U.S. Politics<\/a><\/h3>\n

A recent\u00a0New York Times\/CBS poll<\/a>\u00a0found that 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in U.S. politics, and 85 percent want the campaign financing system completely rebuilt or at least fundamentally changed. Even\u00a0politicians themselves\u00a0will tell you<\/a>\u00a0that big money controls most of what they do.<\/p>\n

Yahoo Finance, however, has\u00a0done a study<\/a>\u00a0on money in politics, and determined that everyone else in America is wrong:<\/p>\n

With so much concern about democracy for sale, Yahoo Finance set out to ask a basic question: Are rich donors buying election results? We scrutinized thousands of federal records on campaign donations in presidential and congressional campaigns in 2012 and 2014, and came up with this simple answer: no.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Yahoo did was simple and straightforward: Look at the top 10 individual donors to campaigns and Super PACs, as well as the top 10 biggest Super PACs, and then check to see how often the candidates the donors and Super PACs supported won.<\/p>\n

And it turned out that\u00a0big money\u2019s candidates didn\u2019t win every time! For instance, the candidates of the top individual donor, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, won only 56 percent of the time. The candidates of the biggest-spending Super PAC, Karl Rove\u2019s American Crossroads, only won 51 percent of their races.<\/p>\n

So case closed, according to Yahoo: \u201cThe return on investment to big donors appears to be less than the fretting over the health of democracy suggests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the flaws in Yahoo\u2019s study are as painfully glaring as the lens flare in a J.J. Abrams\u00a0Star Trek<\/i>\u00a0reboot. Here are the top four, from least important to most:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Yahoo doesn\u2019t know who the top individual donors were and how much they gave \u2014 because nobody does.<\/b>\u00a0When you look at Yahoo\u2019s list of the top 10\u00a0donors for the 2012 and 2014 elections, you\u2019ll notice something odd: Charles Koch is last, at No. 10, and only contributed a scant $5 million total.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn\u2019t Bought U.S. Politics A recent\u00a0New York Times\/CBS poll\u00a0found that 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in U.S. politics, and 85 percent want the campaign financing system completely rebuilt or at least fundamentally changed. Even\u00a0politicians themselves\u00a0will tell you\u00a0that big money controls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9168,9167,637,9166,5567,978,9113],"class_list":["post-12493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-campaign-donations","tag-pacs","tag-politics","tag-super-pacs","tag-the-intercept","tag-us-politics","tag-yahoo-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12494,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12493\/revisions\/12494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}