When money is free speech

While this all seems weird, I'm not sure there's as much of an issue as it's made out to be. If he'd just paid himself the $10MM *before* the campaign, he could just as easily have spent that money on his campaign. The net result would have been the same. It's no different than any other candidate that contributes personal funds to a campaign.

Now, we could argue that candidates shouldn't be allowed at all to contribute to their own campaign (self-financing) and that's another issue worth discussing - but I don't think there's anything particularly weird going on his case compared to what Romney, Huntsman, Kerry, or any number of other wealthy candidates might do. The timing of when he got paid vs when he spent the money just was flipped.

 

I initially thought that, but on a closer read, however, it turns out it wasn't his money or his corporation. He was just the CEO.

I think now with the USS. Ct. ruling it may not matter if a corporation wants to spend $10 million on a candidate whether he has anything to do with the corp they can.

I suppose it looks nicer to launder it through his personal account to make it look like his money.

 

Careful, judoka, you aren't acting so content. Having a bad day?

 

OK, if that's the case, then that's a problem. Based on his statements that he's the only one who decides his compensation, I assumed it was his own business. If he's accountable to other shareholders, he can't just arbitrarily decide what he wants to pay himself. That's an ethical problem within the company, regardless of whether he violated any particular campaign finance laws.

 

To those of you criticizing pirc1 for his view, it seems none of you are stepping up in revolution against the rich.

If anything, I bet if you ever became multi-millionaires, you'd also try to cement your position and wealth for your kids and grandkids through political means. You'd also want to be paying no taxes, having your kids go to private schools, while letting public school fire their teachers.

 

It turns out that he is the CEO of a company that is owned by a public company run by his father-in-law. The company's only customer is it's parent company. It sounds very fishy.

 

Out of curiosity, could I register myself as a corporation, morph to a pass-through entity, loan myself my salary, and pay no taxes?

 

As long as your tax attorney is good enough to scare off the IRS, yes.

 

I'd also need to convince my current employer to continue working with me as a corporate-corporate contract. I'd wager the "scaring off the IRS" component is a lot more difficult when you're not obscenely wealthy (America, **** yeah).

Still it's an amusing idea - imagine if every person did this. Ironically enough, most end-of-life attorney's basically advocate the same thing to avoid probate.

 

I am not saying it is right for the rich to be powerful, and i am certain not rich. The point is the game always favor the rich and powerful. Even if we throw out the old kings, we just replace them with a bunch of new kings, and rich continues to rule over us.

 

Fortunately there are those who believe and work for justice and have at times made progress for the majority of folks.

 

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By the same token, Republican members of Congress should have to justify the tax breaks they and their wealthy contributors get in the context of the debt those breaks pile on our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The analogy he used about family budgets (a husband makes $40k, a wife makes $40k) left out the rich uncle who lives in the garage apartment and keeps kicking in less and less to the family budget every year. The Senator (like the rest of his GOP brethren) looks only at the spending side of the budget equation, ignoring the fact that the tax burden is the lowest it has been in the post WWII period.

Taxes must go back up for the budget to balance. It isn't a hard concept to understand, look at a graph of the deficit. Reagan lowered taxes to unsustainable levels, drove up the debt, after which Bush and Clinton had to raise taxes to balance the budget. Bush the younger lowered taxes to unsustainable levels and now we need to raise them again to balance the budget.

 

Big Money is everywhere - even at the super-small local level. The citizen's voice is virtually non-existent (same probably goes for democracy).

 

"When the same elites who fund federal elections start pouring unfathomable sums of money into our community’s school board races, it robs us of the last promise of democracy: the hope that while wealth and power dictate federal and state policy, every person can still have a small impact on his or her own local community."

That is incredibly demoralizing.

 

The reality that most folks appear happy to pretend does not exist as long as they can keep buying those shiny toys.