Today’s decision in the McCutcheon case allows you and me to join the 650 individuals who felt frustrated at only being able to spend $123,200 for access to national politicians in the last election cycle. We maxed out donating to only 18 Congresspersons! Horrors! Thanks to the 5-4 Supreme Court majority in McCutcheon, we can now put up to $2,600 in our own names directly into the pockets of every single candidate for Congress. And we can personally give $10,000 to party committees in all 50 states. Isn’t that wonderful? This money, of course, is on top of the unlimited amounts we can put into the politicians’ PACs, if we work through a corporation or other organization, thanks to the Citizens United decision.
Still, I think democracy is not fully serviced here (in the sense that a bull is said to service a cow). After all, you really can’t buy a Congress member for $2,600 any more. It takes an average of $3.7 million for each of them to run their election campaigns. Look for the next Supreme Court case to remove the remaining limits on individual donations per candidate. If money is speech, as the court has now said several times, then no limits are constitutionally defensible.
The court’s solicitude for the frustration of the 650 individuals who were only allowed to speak $123,200 in the last election echoes the benevolence of the Federal Reserve Bank toward the nation’s one per cent. In a recent CNBC piece, CNBC Inside Wealth editor Robert Frank put it bluntly:
The largesse of the Federal Reserve over the past five years has amounted to one of the largest ever subsidies to the American wealthy—fueling record fortunes, record numbers of new millionaires and billionaires, and an unprecedented shopping spree for everything from Ferraris to Francis Bacon paintings. The prices of the assets owned by the wealthy, and the things they buy, have gone parabolic, bearing little relationship to the weak, broader economy.
More millionaires have been created during the five years of the Obama administration, Frank reports, than during the eight years of Bush. This past year alone, says Frank, the top ten billionaires in America saw their fortunes grow by a combined $101.8 billion.
The reason is simple: Fed policy has fueled a surge in the value of financial assets. Since the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans own 60 percent of financial assets, and the top 10 percent own 80 percent of the stocks, those gains in financial assets have gone disproportionately to a small group at the top.
In a separate piece, Stanley Druckenmiller, himself a billionaire hedge fund founder, called the Fed’s monetary policy “the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich ever.”
Government policy, not hard work and thrift, has made the rich even richer. Government policy has made the middle class and poor ever poorer. Government policy is driving deeper the wedge between the classes.
Thanks to the McCutcheon decision, this trend will likely continue and accelerate. The rich will have even greater influence with the politicians who set government policy and who select the judges. The politicians and judges will show even greater solicitude toward the rich. It’s the best of all possible worlds!
If you are rich.
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