The Billionaire's Third Party

Same thing! I will spend millions to get you elected, if you ...(fill in blank), is the same as bribing and/or expecting something in return, only no money exchanges hands, from the briber to the bribee. It is why there are limits on the amount of money that can be donated to the cause. The intent if you will. Calling it something else, doesn't change the fact it is being used for the same cause.

As I said, intellectual dishonesty and semantics.

The entire election process has become compromised by the two corporate owned parties and this is a very real example of how big business and big donors are manipulating the election process.

 

Money doesn't buy you anything in politics but it does buy you politicians. The biggest spender doesn't always win it is true, but on the other hand one of the two biggest spenders does always win.

And the reason the Koch brothers don't just pick a yes man out of their own ranks and run him for office is that the illusion of Democracy must be preserved so the mindless proletariat doesn't wake up.

 

^_- Running an ad on an issue you believe in, which indirectly supports a candidate, is bribery? So in your mind anyone paying for any political ad, or donating money, is committing bribery? Come on. The law is super-duper clear that that isn't what bribery is, and you haven't made a good case for why it should be considered as such. Because according to what you just said, if I go out and buy a piece of wood and cardboard and make a sign for a candidate then stick it in my yard, then I've just committed election fraud. Do you see why I can't take that claim seriously without a more rigorous defense of it being first made?

 

Does everyone here really think it is a coincidence that as the role of big money in politics is increasing the distribution of wealth in this country is also going increasingly toward the top one percent.

 

There is an or there. We do not either know nor can we prove it isn't on the bribery side, and if they are spending more than the legal limit to support a candidate or attack their opponent, it IS support by funding, the intent of the campaign finance laws which is meant to curtail. It allows individuals who cannot even cast a vote to donate to the cause of getting an individual or political party elected, even if it be indirectly. It allows corporations/unions to participate the same way. It also allows outside money, from foreign countries, interests, etc... to meddle in the election process. That is a problem in a so-called democratic election if outside parties or entities, have a say.

Me personally, I have no problem with public service announcements (in fact I encourage the ones that actually use truth based on facts instead of hyperbole to send a message to the community at large), or a person sharing their opinions on issues in public places. You want to stand on a street corner and pass out flyers you paid for out of your own pocket, declaring your passion against gay marriage/illegal immigration/over taxation/over regulating, etc... etc... or if you support them, you have every right to say so, and/or why, but tagging on an and that is why I support/oppose Joe candidate/party, you are campaigning for them directly.

 

Does everyone here really think that it is a coincidence that bigfoot sightings increase whenever there are more rainbows, hence leprechauns guarding their gold?

 

Not necessary, bribery is a specific, serious crime. It involves bags of MONEY generally, not advertisements, and is easily distinguishable from the money that PACs, RW or LW, spend on ADS. We have all manner of preexisting laws to deter bribery, everything from federal mail and wire fraud, RICO, whistleblower, IRS, securities laws, specific judicial, lawyer, law enforcement, public employee statutes, etc., to basic state criminal codes. If you want to worry about bribery, that's fine, look for the actual BROWN BAGS. That isn't the topic though, and PAC ads are not bribery as a matter of definition.

 

Right they are built in loopholes for getting around campaign finance laws, that could also be used for the purpose of bribery. They have no place in the election process but to give candidates/parties better chances of being or getting elected.

How do you know Bill Mayer didn't give the Obama PAC a million dollars for the express purpose of getting Obama reelected, with no strings attached? That is the definition of bribery by the way. Bribes come in all forms, bribery is an act of offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an official in the discharge of his or her official duties that alters the behavior of the recipient, and the "gift" is of a dishonest nature.

Bribery constitutes a crime in any form that it is offered or solicited.

 

That's a new one.

Are suggesting that the highest level of elected official corruption in this country's history has nothing to do with the accumulation of wealth? If you believe that is just a coincidence perhaps you also believe the Bigfoot/leprechaun connection to be factual as well.

 

What I believe is that forwarding any raw correlation without some interstitial, factual, causal reasoning, is the equivalent of bigfoot/leprechaun thinking. The left regularly forwards correlations on this forum, daily in fact, that would get reasonable private sector people fired or put in jail... or at least cost them lots of money. Just another luxury of being entirely free of competitive market realities I guess.

 

Unresponsive. The reason I know that anonymous PAC contributions don't amount to bribery is that they don't under any legal definition of the crime. If they did, rest assured, in our bloated law enforcement bureaucracy, they would be indicted and convicted.

 

So you are saying there is absolutely no evidence of cause and effect while correlating the fact that the government is steadily becoming more corrupt while the rich are getting richer, as the middle class is depleting, and the working poor are becoming less relevant and more dependent on the government than ever before in our recorded history?

That's like saying just because there are water stains on the ceiling, it doesn't mean the roof leaks because it obviously isn't raining right now.

 

Most of the above is egregious BS. Our middle class is burgeoning, our poor have more than the middle class in the rest of the world. Our poor are the world's 1% merely due to living in the US. Our children have $200 billion of purchasing power, more than 3/4 of the world's countries have GDP. The US is filthy rich and getting richer. The fact that a woman can make $8 million a year for flipping letters in a game show proves indisputably that we are a stinking rich country with scads of disposable dollars to support such a celebrity/capitalist class. The thing that you and others don't ever get is that people can't get obscenely wealthy unless almost EVERYONE, or at least a vast majority, has plenty of luxury disposable income. In this respect, wealth disparity proves national affluence. Yes, undifferentiated, unskilled labor will continue to suffer, and should. People who drop out of HS, make bad choice after bad choice, float from retail to restaurant job endlessly and aimlessly are not the "middle class" or the "working class" but the "stupid class." Personally, I don't give a rat's ass what happens to them, they make their own choices.

Turning to the logical ramifications of the above quote, you are asking me to prove a negative, when you haven't even bothered to offer any evidence at all of any causal connections in your broad, raw correlation. In essence, "you can't prove that bigfoot sightings don't track leprechaun rainbows, so it must be true." About as fallacy-ridden as it gets, yet that and similar is repeated endlessly, day in day out, on this forum by leftists.

 

Of course they do. They are a valuable asset to the candidate they support, and the funding is unlimited. All that is missing is a taped discussion establishing the terms of the bribery. All the other necessary criteria is already in place.

Lobbying- The offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an elected official in the discharge of his or her elected duties/responsibilities.

Bribery- The offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an elected official in the discharge of his or her elected duties/responsibilities.

Which one is illegal?

 

The one that fits the definition of a crime under one of the many statutes and regulations I referenced which you of course ignore.

 

Translation- Our peasants are better off than their peasants so we are morally superior, and we got Vanna White too. We win.

Have you kissed your Bigfoot today?

 

They are both criminal by design, unfortunately the plutocracy tolerates one as a necessary evil, but has the other for a back up so if one of their corporate sock puppets defects and turns on the status quo they can be dealt with properly and expeditiously. As an example to others who believe their oath of office is legitimate.

 

http://anticorruptionact.org/

 

The issue is not whether unlimited secret campaign cash is illegal or whether it's bribery.

Institutionalized secret influence buying is perfectly legal, thanks to the Roberts Court.

The issue is the fact that secret campaign cash allows a candidate or party to be owned outright by powerful interests without any of their supporters knowing who is pulling the strings.

Conservatives here have either defended this, or tried to excuse it.

The GOP has fought hard to keep it legal.

 

That must explain why the GOP has become utterly amoral and quite a different party from the one it was before.

 

Causal reasoning in this case is trivial. Donations from the rich dominate contributions to elections making candidates beholden to wealthy doners. They win the presidency and the congress and then pass laws favoring those that gave them the money and the rich get richer.

Why do you think tax rates on the top incomes keep going down and long term capital gains are taxed less than income from labor. And capital assets that are inherited are valued using the stepped up basis. Etc.

 

Because 1. that money has already been taxed as income at some point. 2. Capital investment, and encouragement of same, is a real wealth creator as opposed to government transfer payments, leading to the obscene wealth Americans at all levels have compared to the rest of the world. 3. Differential tax treatment of capital gains benefits not only the wealthy, but average joe holders of the hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in 401k and other retirement plans. In many such instances, money could be earned as income, contributed to a retirement plan, and then partially taxed again as cap gains in the same year it was earned, which would be unjust. 4. Stepped up basis at death is a huge incentive towards general liquidity in the economy, and encourages heirs to liquidate and spend many inherited assets they may otherwise hold to avoid cap gains tax. Once again, this benefits many other than the rich, small business owners of all types, family farm heirs and others. It's easy to blithely mischaracterize all tax easing as "for the rich" but this is far from accurate. 5. Differential tax treatment of cap gains leads to greater liquidity in all markets, and the benefits of liquidity cannot be overestimated. Were equity gains suddenly taxed as income, it would result in a X% instantaneous devaluation of US equities, and maybe even a financial crisis of its own.

 

2. There is nothing inherently wrong with dicounting capital gains in order to encourage investment. However, those discounts have been heavily misused by the financial services industry to restate earned income as capital gains for tax purposes. Few people on Wall Street pay taxes on their earned income any more. Of course, variations on this sort of dodge have been going on since Reagan's 1981 tax bill opened the floodgates, and accelerated the rate of accumulation of wealth by the very wealthy. Discounted capital gains taxation and the rush to hide ordinary income as capital gains is one of the main drivers.

3. Your comments regarding 401k's make no sense at all. Nearly all the money that goes into 401K's will be taxed as ordinary income.

I doubt your last claim is actually true, as such changes have occurred in the past without collapse.

Of course, using the same reasoning, the opposite ought to be true.

But no instant boom occurred when large amounts if interest in investment income suddenly began being taxed at discounted rates after Reagan's 1981 tax bill was enacted. In fact, the economy continued to decline, and unemployment was worse in 1984 than it was in 1981.

 

I just stopped there. Where are you licensed as a CPA or to practice law? I worked on Wall Street for years and can assure readers here that the statement "few people on Wall Street pay taxes on their earned income any more " is thoroughly inaccurate, and one of the most moronic things I've ever seen posted to this forum to boot. It is not only not true, but there isn't even a kernel of truth in it. For all I know the rest of the post is comprised of the same kind of folly and BS.

 

Taxing equity gains as income is a straw man and you know it. That is not the same as eliminating stepped up,basis for inheritance. And you can do a very easy search to find out that the rich benefit disproportionately from special treatment of equities.

And no, the money that goes into equities has not necessarily been taxed at some point. Perhaps you have never heard of IRA's.