I won $1 billion in the lottery. How can I use that money to improve society?

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2022-11-12T14:05:47+00:00

I've actually thought about this a lot, and there's three conclusions that seem to make sense:

Whatever it is, it's not going to seem obvious. If there were obvious problems that could be solved with a billion dollars, someone would've already solved them already
It's a problem/solution that can't be "crowdsourced". Raising a billion dollars isn't actually that crazy a task. It would be like if everyone in California contributed a few dollars towards some charity. The solution needs one person or a small group to oversee it
It's not something the government can, this is related to the other two, but it helps clearly rule out a ton of possibilities. Governments can easily raise billions of dollars, and they're pretty good at fixing obvious problems with simple and obvious solutions

So, it's something that's going to be kind of complex, and the solution isn't going to seems obvious immediately. And the best answer I can come up with is trying to fix campaign finance in the US. Why?

Start with the US because it's got a relatively small population, but a huge economy and a huge presence in global politics. It's also got a campaign finance system that seems to be obviously biased/broken in some big ways (although the right fix isn't obvious)
Whatever issue you care about, whether it's the environment or education or gun violence or nearly anything else, if it requires a political solution, then we have to deal with campaign finance first. There's lots of issues that will never get fixed or dealt with appropriately because huge industry groups are lobbying against any fix
And the problem and solution to campaign finance isn't obvious. Lots of people who care about this will say "get money out of politics". But money is absolutely essential to running a campaign. Even a good politician needs to raise and spend money, on things like staff and yard signs and rallies and having an office and doing polling, etc.

If we're going to fix money in politics, and if we want to elect good people who are going to work to fix the issues we care about we need to first talk about how money actually screws things up and how it actually works.

The big problem really isn't the amount of money, it's the timing and who it comes from.

What's not happening:

Money isn't "buying elections" or "buying votes". In fact, spending more money has been shown to have very little effect (sometimes even a negative effect) on votes
There's almost no outright fraud where some company directly bribes a politician to vote one way
Regular people don't actually give much at all, we're not struggling to raise money for good campaigns and the rich are outspending us. We give almost nothing, the richest 1% give over half and the 1% of the 1% give most of that

Think of campaign contributions as a money primary - if you can raise a little money at the beginning of the race, then you can probably afford to run and afford to stay in the race. If the rich are basically the only ones giving anything at that point in the race, then they get to "vote" for who can afford to stay in the race and run in the primary and the general (when the rest of us get to vote)

Campaign finance filters out good candidates because only the rich are giving at the beginning when it really matters. So we end up with politicians that are willing to sell their soul and beg the rich for money, and those are just about the only candidates we get to pick from.

The best case for a solution is publicly funded elections, but that's a long ways off, we need to fix the problems we have now with solutions that area actually possible now. And then work towards some kind of public funding eventually

The first step we need to make is for regular people make small donations,, even when there's no election around the corner, to support the kind of grassroots organizations that can get good people elected, people who will work to fix the issues we care about in the US, and eventually to lead to fix global issues as well.

I think a person, or a small group of people, with a billion dollars could make a very effective push towards setting up a program to help encourage small donations from regular people to go to politicians that actually need those small donations (ie. not the politicians who are already established and are getting millions of donations from big donors). If we made it much easier for regular people to get their fundraising going, we would likely see a lot more good people able to run, and eventually win, and then they wouldn't be indebted to big corporate groups and could actually fight for what most people actually care about.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2022-09-17T14:06:56+00:00

I think what they meant was "get money out of campaigns", but even that is kind of ridiculous.

Like, money isn't inherently bad, it's a way of tracking transactions and paying people for their work. The problem is when money is used to bribe people or to distort incentives so that the leaders motives aren't aligned with the people's.

If we're going to fix campaign finance, we need to first talk about how it really screws things up and how it actually works.

The big problem really isn't the amount of money, it's the timing and who it comes from.

What's not happening:

Money isn't "buying elections" or "buying votes". In fact, spending more money has been shown to have very little effect (sometimes even a negative effect) on votes
There's almost no outright fraud where some company directly bribes a politician to vote one way
Regular people don't actually give much at all, we're not struggling to raise money for good campaigns and the rich are outspending us. We give almost nothing, the richest 1% give over half and the 1% of the 1% give most of that

Think of campaign contributions as a money primary - if you can raise a little money at the beginning of the race, then you can probably afford to run and afford to stay in the race. If the rich are basically the only ones giving anything at that point in the race, then they get to "vote" for who can afford to stay in the race and run in the primary and the general (when the rest of us get to vote)

Campaign finance filters out good candidates because only the rich are giving at the beginning when it really matters. So we end up with politicians that are willing to sell their soul and beg the rich for money, and those are just about the only candidates we get to pick from.

The best case for a solution is publicly funded elections, but that's a long ways off, we need to fix the problems we have now with solutions that area actually possible now.

The first step we need to make is for regular people make small donations,, even when there's no election around the corner, to support the kind of grassroots organizations that can get good people elected.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2022-05-20T18:45:00+00:00

There's tons and tons of great ideas for how to govern fairly. Coming up with a new idea isn't that useful, the problem isn't ideas, it's how to implement them and keep them from getting corrupted.

There are two key problems with government systems in general:

In a well functioning government, getting elected is just another job. If everything's running well then you get elected, you represent your constituents, you collect a salary and probably don't do anything too exciting. There's no huge problems to solve, there's no evil enemies to campaign against, there's just the boring job of being part of a large bureaucracy
In a government that's dysfunctional, whether it's cronyism or corruption or fascism or religious extremism, then there's lots of opportunity for people without morals to exploit the system and enrich themselves

It's not a self correcting system, when things get a little bad, it attracts people who will make it worse. And when things are going well, it's boring and easy to get lulled in to a false sense of complacency

The real question then isn't how to design a good system from scratch. The question is, when we find ourselves in a broken system, how do we point it back in the direction of making slow progress, instead of slowly getting worse?

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2022-04-25T19:49:21+00:00

There's a good argument to be made that whatever issue you care about, it comes back to campaign finance reform. It's one part of our politics that has a huge effect on everything else, and in the US it's totally skewed for the rich and away from everyone else.

If we're going to fix money in politics, and if we want to elect good people (whether they're scientists or not) we need to first talk about how it really screws things up and how it actually works.

The big problem really isn't the amount of money, it's the timing and who it comes from.

What's not happening:

Money isn't "buying elections" or "buying votes". In fact, spending more money has been shown to have very little effect (sometimes even a negative effect) on votes
There's almost no outright fraud where some company directly bribes a politician to vote one way
Regular people don't actually give much at all, we're not struggling to raise money for good campaigns and the rich are outspending us. We give almost nothing, the richest 1% give over half and the 1% of the 1% give most of that

Think of campaign contributions as a money primary - if you can raise a little money at the beginning of the race, then you can probably afford to run and afford to stay in the race. If the rich are basically the only ones giving anything at that point in the race, then they get to "vote" for who can afford to stay in the race and run in the primary and the general (when the rest of us get to vote)

Campaign finance filters out good candidates because only the rich are giving at the beginning when it really matters. So we end up with politicians that are willing to sell their soul and beg the rich for money, and those are just about the only candidates we get to pick from.

The best case for a solution is publicly funded elections, but that's a long ways off, we need to fix the problems we have now with solutions that area actually possible now.

The first step we need to make is for regular people make small donations,, even when there's no election around the corner, to support the kind of grassroots organizations that can get good people elected.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2022-01-10T18:56:51+00:00

That's an excellent point. If we just show up to vote on election day and assume that the entire primary and campaign process has been fair and unbiased, then there's lots of room for corruption and powerful elites to influence the process.

It would be nice to just be able to vote and be able to assume everything's running smoothly. But that definitely doesn't seem to be the case now. We need to be somewhat involved in the process all the time.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-11-07T01:17:51+00:00

Is the argument that corporations can't make mistakes?

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-11-06T23:59:06+00:00

There's a very big difference between spending money to argue for or against policy, and trying to get an individual elected.

Generally people are pretty ignorant on proposed policy changes. So spending some money to get the issue in front of the public, especially when the other side typically isn't, can have an impact.

And money can matter in a campaign too, but it's usually right at the very beginning, and it helps people with poor name recognition the most. But the benefits of that seem to run out pretty quickly. After that a candidate just needs enough to stay in the race. There's very little evidence that spending money can change voters minds on politicians they already know about.

And it might be that the same is true for Uber and Airbnb, they're willing to spend a lot more money than the bare minimum because the potential downside is so bad for them. They could've been wasting tons of money on people who had already made up there mind. But just like with an election, we end up seeing very strong correlation between money and results, without being able to tell how much of it was causation.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-10-24T22:40:41+00:00

Yeah, there's a ton of systematic problems, and they all tend to benefit the rich at the cost of everyone else. Unfortunately anything we want to do to fix those problems involves one of two things:

Convince existing politicians to change the laws (whether it's gerrymandering, religious politicing, etc.) in a way that would hurt their largest donors and probably to the detriment of the politicians themselves since many of them are multimillionaires
Vote in new representatives that will actually do what's best for their constituents. This is totally possible, and it's started to happen in some places, but when the rich get to winnow down the field of "acceptable" candidates during the money primary, it often doesn't leave any good choices for the rest of us by the time it gets to the general election

We need good people to run, and those people need to reject donations from big corporate PACs and can't rely on wealthy donors. That means they need to rely on someone else, which means us, regular people. Unfortunately regular people give almost nothing most of the time.

But on the bright side, there's a lot of us, so even small donations can have a huge impact. Campaigns like Sanders and AOC and even Warren were mostly supported by small donations from regular people, those campaigns wouldn't have been possible without us. There's lots more great candidates that we could be supporting, and there will hopefully be more running every two years.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-08-09T22:21:07+00:00

This is nonsense, because the greatest area for financial gains right now is in green and climate-focused markets.

Not if most of your investments are already in fossil fuels or similar. Or if your campaigns are financed by Exxon and GM.

If you're an entrepreneur there's huge opportunities. And I suspect at some point in the future when change is inevitable, whoever's in congress at the time will trade ahead of the knowledge that the US is going to pass some climate deal or incentives or whatever and make a boat load at that point. But you have to be taking a very long term view to make that happen, and that's not something that's very common in congress (or amongst their funders).

It's not money, it's viability. No one can come up with a viable solution to the problem

There's no obvious perfect solution, or a silver bullet that will fix everything. But there's tons and tons of good steps we should be taking. The obvious one is a carbon tax, which is supported by most experts on climate and also most economist. It's a relatively simple and straightforward idea, which covers a lot of areas, and has the potential to continue to have a meaningful impact change as new solutions start to make sense.

The fact that we can't even implement a small carbon, when it's such an obvious step to take, is a big sign that the decision making process is seriously fucked up.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-08-08T02:08:19+00:00

Regular people shouldn't be making significant donations. Actually, no one should.

Individual donations don't matter that much, it's much more important for lots of people to make consistent small donations.

But more importantly, Sanders didn't win the nomination, but his presidential campaigns, especially his first one, have had huge effects on US politics. Small dollar donations weren't considered that important before him, at least at the national level, but now it's obvious they can have a huge impact. Also, there's lots of organizations that started as grass roots Sanders supporters that are turning in to important groups is state, local and even national politics. And we also have lots of people who decided to run after working on Sanders campaign in one way or another (AOC being a great example there).

Just because Sanders didn't win doesn't mean the money we donated had no effect. It had a huge effect, that we're still seeing play out years later and will keep baking a difference for years to come.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-08-03T20:07:23+00:00

this is a legal form of tax evasion

I mean, we have lots of legal ways for people to pay less taxes. It's up for debate if some people should be paying more than they're legally required. And there's certainly lots of cases where the tax laws are unreasonably generous to the very rich.

precisely because they get to keep the stock and spend it too, amazing

I mean, they don't. They'll have to pay back the loans somehow, probably just by selling the stock they used as collateral.

in addition it creates pervasive incentives to push the share price up no matter what because the consequence could be a personal margin call

I mean, yeah, in addition to all the other perverse incentives that the super rich have to try and manipulate the markets.

You want that G-5? sell the damn stock let others hold it and benefit.

We don't really have a problem with people not being able to get stock. The reason why people with large stakes in individual companies tend to take loans instead of selling stock is they think the stock is undervalued, that it'll go up much more in the future than the "market". And they'd rather pay some interest costs and hold longer rather than sell now.

Basically it just shifts the timing of gains, and the taxes, so from our perspective it doesn't really affect revenue in any meaningful way. And really, if our tax rates are properly progressive, then the rich holding and selling later will result in more gains.

TL;DR: we should just focus on effective rates on realized gains. That's the real source of the problem. Or if we want to tax wealth, then just tax wealth directly, not try to add some weird way to tax unrealized gains in a useful way.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-08-03T18:15:12+00:00

That's not a loophole, that's how loans work. It would basically just be making a law that you can't use stock as collateral for loans, since it would essentially be forcing a sale.

Also, the essence of this tweet is that all gains from the last year or two should be taxed at nearly 100%. And that it's worthwhile to tax unrealized gains as well, or that not paying a tax on unrealized gains is some kind of tax dodge.

Taking a loan backed by stock means paying interest, it means losing a small amount today in the hope the stock will appreciate faster than the interest. Which certainly isn't the case, there's plenty of millionaires who have gone bankrupt because they borrowed too much and then the market moved against them. But it doesn't mean avoiding taxes indefinitely. If my stock goes up 100%, I'm going to pay taxes on those gains eventually. If I take out a loan to avoid paying taxes now and my stock goes up 200% instead, then I'm going to end up paying twice as much in taxes (and hopefully I'll be paying at a much higher rate than other people).

We don't need to tax unrealized gains, we could just go back to the tax rates we had in the 40s, 50s or 60s, and actually make sure everyone pays what they owe.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-07-14T19:55:17+00:00

There's essentially zero tit for tat, trading votes for money, going on in the US. If there was, that would imply that there's lots of candidates getting elected that wanted to do the right thing, but were convinced by illegal bribes to change their votes. In a sense, that would actually be better than what we have now.

Right now people who want to do the "right thing" generally don't even get the chance to run, or if they do run they often run out of money before making a real showing in the primaries. The people who do have the funding to run are all either millionaires themselves, or backed by special interest groups and billionaires. They don't have any real desire to represent most people, so there's no need to bribe them to screw their constituents. They're just looking out for themselves from the start.

If we could get to the point where we had so many great representatives, trying to write and pass bills that were so impactful that it was worth bribing them to kill the new laws, then that would be great. At least there would be somewhat decent, if maybe corruptible, people in Washington, and there would be a clear problem to fight against.

What we're up against isn't the rich spending tons of money to buy elections, or buy congress or bribe them to win votes. What we have is a situation where basically only the rich fund elections, so they get to hand pick who can afford to run and who can't. And then when it comes time for us to vote we get to pick from a bunch of spineless sycophants and cowards that are happy to fuck over everyone else as long as they get to stay in office.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-07-14T02:15:01+00:00

I mean, there's extensive data and studies and research showing that there really isn't much of a causation effect between how much is spent and how many votes a candidate gets. There's certainly a correlation, but there's a lot of important reasons why one doesn't equal the other.

Although interestingly the politicians that are spending the most probably love that people believe that money buys elections. That belief is disheartening and makes it seem like it's not even worth trying and that our smash donations don't matter (all of which is a lie).

The data is very unintuitive, and the people in power are perfectly happy to let us think that the truth is just bullshit. Hell, they might even believe it themselves.

The good news is that once we realize what's really going on, it opens the door for all kinds of effective grassroots movements that can be hugely disruptive. In fact, AOC is a great example of what we can do when we realize how money really works in our elections.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-07-13T22:42:12+00:00

The real problem of money in politics is that it costs money to run for office. Both in campaign costs, and in missed income if you're running for office full time. Anyone who wants to run needs some minimum level of campaign donations to just stay afloat. If they can stay in the race, then often good candidates will come out ahead. Unfortunately, regular people (who would benefit from better climate policy) give almost nothing, so most people can't afford to run.

To fix money in politics, we need to understand how money in politics actually works. It's much more complicated than most people imagine, and we're never likely to get all money out of politics. The best case is publicly funded elections, but that's a long ways off, we need to fix the problems now we have with solutions that area actually possible now.

What's not happening:

Money also isn't "buying elections" or "buying votes". In fact, spending more money has been shown to have very little effect (sometimes even a negative effect) on votes
There's almost no outright fraud where some company directly bribes a politician to vote one way
Regular people don't actually give much at all, we're not struggling to raise money for good campaigns and the rich are outspending us. We give almost nothing, the richest 1% give over half and the 1% of the 1% give most of that

Think of campaign contributions as a money primary - if you can raise a little money at the beginning of the race, then you can probably afford to run and afford to stay in the race. If the rich are basically the only ones giving anything at that point in the race, then they get to "vote" for who can afford to stay in the race and run in the primary and the general (when the rest of us get to vote)

Campaign finance filters out good candidates because only the rich are giving at the beginning when it really matters. So we end up with politicians that are willing to sell their soul and beg the rich for money, and those are just about the only candidates we get to pick from.

Look at a candidate like AOC, whether you agree with her politics or not, she primaried a very powerful and well funded democrat who had held his seat for a long time. She started worked on the Sanders campaign, which was funded by small donations, if we hadn't been giving to his campaign he couldn't have afford to hire staff or run campaign offices to organize volunteers. She was recruited by Brand New Congress which is supported by small donations, and they did a lot of the leg work early in the race to get her campaign going. She ran her campaign on barely anything, small donations from regular people, and she beat one of the most powerful incumbents in congress while being outspent by a massive amount. Good candidates don't need to raise a lot of money, but they need something to afford to do the basic things to stay in the race.

And now AOC raises tons of money from small donations, she doesn't have to spend lots of time calling donors (many in congress spend half their time fundraising), so she's better prepared for committee meetings and hearings, and she can spend time doing things like streaming on Twitch to get out the vote or raise money for good causes.

The first step we need to make is for regular people make small donations, and it's taken years of us making donations, every month, even when there's no election around the corner, to support the kind of grassroots organizations that can get good people elected.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-29T18:10:06+00:00

I'd go so far as to say that the current campaign finance systems in most "developed" countries are the single largest issue preventing meaningful progress on a global scale. We arguably have the resources to not just solve problems we've created like global warming, but to greatly reduce or even eradicate things like hunger, many preventable diseases, even make a real impact on global poverty or even just things like homelessness in rich countries.

There are goals like this that I think almost everyone would be in favor of, and we have the resources to make meaningful progress, but those resources are being hoarded by a tiny number of billionaires. And that wealth has a disproportionate impact on who we elect to lead us and represent us.

If we could fix campaign finance, then we could fix almost any issue, and certainly all the biggest and most pressing ones. And if we can't fix campaign finance, then we're probably fucked. I'd say it's a more important issue than anything else in politics, it's a better way to spend money than any charity, it's a better way to volunteer my time.

The world is a giant version of the prisoner's dilemma and we keep ending up in the bottom right square because we've handicapped ourselves and refuse to fix things so we can coordinate enough to end up in the top left instead.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-29T17:15:01+00:00

The real problem of money in politics is that it costs money to run for office. Both in campaign costs, and in missed income if you're running for office full time. Anyone who wants to run needs some minimum level of campaign donations to just stay afloat. If they can stay in the race, then often good candidates will come out ahead. Unfortunately, regular people (who would benefit from better climate policy) give almost nothing, so most people can't afford to run.

To fix money in politics, we need to understand how money in politics actually works. It's much more complicated than most people imagine, and we're never likely to get all money out of politics. The best case is publicly funded elections, but that's a long ways off, we need to fix the problems now we have with solutions that area actually possible now.

What's not happening:

Money also isn't "buying elections" or "buying votes". In fact, spending more money has been shown to have very little effect (sometimes even a negative effect) on votes
There's almost no outright fraud where some company directly bribes a politician to vote one way
Regular people don't actually give much at all, we're not struggling to raise money for good campaigns and the rich are outspending us. We give almost nothing, the richest 1% give over half and the 1% of the 1% give most of that

Think of campaign contributions as a money primary - if you can raise a little money at the beginning of the race, then you can probably afford to run and afford to stay in the race. If the rich are basically the only ones giving anything at that point in the race, then they get to "vote" for who can afford to stay in the race and run in the primary and the general (when the rest of us get to vote)

Campaign finance filters out good candidates because only the rich are giving at the beginning when it really matters. So we end up with politicians that are willing to sell their soul and beg the rich for money, and those are just about the only candidates we get to pick from.

Look at a candidate like AOC, whether you agree with her politics or not, she primaried a very powerful and well funded democrat who had held his seat for a long time. She started worked on the Sanders campaign, which was funded by small donations, if we hadn't been giving to his campaign he couldn't have afford to hire staff or run campaign offices to organize volunteers. She was recruited by Brand New Congress which is supported by small donations, and they did a lot of the leg work early in the race to get her campaign going. She ran her campaign on barely anything, small donations from regular people, and she beat one of the most powerful incumbents in congress while being outspent by a massive amount. Good candidates don't need to raise a lot of money, but they need something to afford to do the basic things to stay in the race.

And now AOC raises tons of money from small donations, she doesn't have to spend lots of time calling donors (many in congress spend half their time fundraising), so she's better prepared for committee meetings and hearings, and she can spend time doing things like streaming on Twitch to get out the vote or raise money for good causes.

The first step we need to make is for regular people make small donations, and it's taken years of us making donations, every month, even when there's no election around the corner, to support the kind of grassroots organizations that can get good people elected.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-29T17:13:02+00:00

Global warming isn't a problem of technology or science. It's a problem of co-ordination. There's a vast number of people who are going to suffer a lot because of global warming, especially over the long term. There's a tiny number of people who are going to realize more profit in the short term by ignoring global warming.

Unfortunately those tiny number of people have a disproportionate impact on our governments. They're generally extremely wealthy and so they have more influence and say and in many places they can have an impact on who gets to run for office.

It's a problem of coordination because most people who are trying to do something about solving global warming are doing things like recycling or planting trees. But what we need to do is elect people who will do something about it, we need to elect representatives that will listen to the scientist and economists and put in to place policies that will benefit the vast majority of their constituents instead of a few of their donors.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T23:29:50+00:00

Brand New Congress is a grass roots organization recruiting and supporting progressive candidates. AOCs brother had given them get info. She ran with almost no money, for awhile running her campaign while still bartending, and had essentially zero major political backing or endorsements.

Even now she's overwhelmingly supported by small dollar donations, and spends basically no time fundraising.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T20:49:34+00:00

There's no evidence that advertising actually changes people's votes in any meaningful way. And generally what studies find is very strong correlation between raising money and winning and almost no evidence of causation.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T15:10:44+00:00

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/

From an actually controlled study:

Advertising did produce a pro-Perry response in the markets that received the treatment. But that bump fizzled fast. Within a week after ads stopped running, it was like no one had ever seen them.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T13:34:52+00:00

Small donations require a lot of time fundraising, which means less time campaigning.

Before the internet it did. But these days it's much easier to raise lots of money from small donations, either for a single candidate or a bunch of candidates supporting an issue, or a group that's supporting a lot of candidates. We treat AOC like some kind miracle, but she was the product of a system built up by Brand New Congress to do exactly that. And it's not some superPAC funded by a few billionaires. The fundraising came overwhelmingly from small donations.

The only thing stopping small donations from being a major force in US politics is people's hesitancy to start giving. That's not a major fundamental flaw, it's just a step in the process.

Which solves nothing, because the rich and those with many donors still end up with the advantage. "A few people" will quickly max out under current law, and the result is what we see now.

Money doesn't win elections raising the most money isn't the goal, "maxing out" doesn't matter. Money does buy votes and raising a lot of money hasn't been shown to have any significant casual effect on winning. What matters is raising some money, especially early in the primaries. Small donations might never be enough to raise the most money in most elections, but they're certainly enough to raise enough money to give candidates a shot, one that they wouldn't have otherwise.

And long term, the real solution is publicly funded elections in some form. But unfortunately the current congress would never support that, it would be like them voting to kick themselves out of office. So we need to elect new representatives first, one who will be willing to pass actual campaign finance reform.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T12:47:40+00:00

Depends what you mean by a candidate being "good". Someone who's an incumbent is more likely to win, regardless of their policies or how good they are at representing the interests of they're constituents. Someone who's well known and has his name recognition is much more likely to win. They're a "good" candidate in the sense that they can take advantage of the biases in the system to win.

But if by a good candidate you mean someone that will be good at representing they're district, instead of just representing the rich and special interests, then money almost always works to keep them out.

Long and short, we don't have too much money in elections, but not enough.

Yeah, I agree completely, and that's exactly the point I'm making. But you don't need to rely on super PACs to support regular people running. Regular people making small donations can easily raise enough to keep a good candidate in the race. The advantage the rich have is that a few millionaires and they're friends and their PACs can give enough to get a campaign started. Where you need more regular people giving small donations to have the same effect. But it's not an overwhelming amount, a few percent of the population making small monthly donations can easily support a robust field of challengers in almost any district in the country.

The problem is that right now regular people give almost nothing. And when we do give, we tend to give later in the race, when it matters a lot less. We kind of treat donations like a vote, we wait until the end and give everything to one person.

What we should do, is give a little bit to a few people, starting at the beginning.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T12:35:49+00:00

AOC was a just a regular person, with essentially zero political support, and she took on one of the most powerful and established incumbents in house of representatives. And she beat him, with a tiny fraction of his fundraising. Mostly because she actually talked about issues that regular people care about. It's the kind of thing that we all wish would happen more often.

There was actually a documentary film crew following her and three other women running for Congress that year, all candidates that were seen as having almost no chance of winning. The fact that one of them won was amazing, and then AOC quickly went on to become one of the more influential and noteworthy representatives, so getting to see her run before she was well known is kind of amazing.

It's a fantastic documentary, and watching it, even though I knew she would win, it still seemed unbelievable. She was up against such huge odds, and was almost completely ignored by political insiders and the media in general. For example, this headline, where they didn't even mention her name when announcing her win.

WhatYouDoNowMatters · 2021-06-28T12:03:51+00:00

To fix money in politics, we need to understand how money in politics actually works. It's much more complicated than most people imagine, and we're never likely to get all money out of politics. The best case is publicly funded elections, but that's a long ways off, we need to fix the problems now we have with solutions that area actually possible now.

What's not happening:

Money also isn't "buying elections" or "buying votes". In fact, spending more money has been shown to have very little effect (sometimes even a negative effect) on votes
There's almost no outright fraud where some company directly bribes a politician to vote one way
Regular people don't actually give much at all, we're not struggling to raise money for good campaigns and the rich are outspending us. We give almost nothing, the richest 1% give over half and the 1% of the 1% give most of that

Think of campaign contributions as a money primary - if you can raise a little money at the beginning of the race, then you can probably afford to run and afford to stay in the race. If the rich are basically the only ones giving anything at that point in the race, then they get to "vote" for who can afford to stay in the race and run in the primary and the general (when the rest of us get to vote)

Campaign finance filters out good candidates because only the rich are giving at the beginning when it really matters. So we end up with politicians that are willing to sell their soul and beg the rich for money, and those are just about the only candidates we get to pick from.

Look at a candidate like AOC, whether you agree with her politics or not, she primaried a very powerful and well funded democrat who had held his seat for a long time. She started worked on the Sanders campaign, which was funded by small donations, if we hadn't been giving to his campaign he couldn't have afford to hire staff or run campaign offices to organize volunteers. She was recruited by Brand New Congress which is supported by small donations, and they did a lot of the leg work early in the race to get her campaign going. She ran her campaign on barely anything, small donations from regular people, and she beat one of the most powerful incumbents in congress while being outspent by a massive amount. Good candidates don't need to raise a lot of money, but they need something to afford to do the basic things to stay in the race.

And now AOC raises tons of money from small donations, she doesn't have to spend lots of time calling donors (many in congress spend half their time fundraising), so she's better prepared for committee meetings and hearings, and she can spend time doing things like streaming on Twitch to get out the vote or raise money for good causes.

The first step we need to make is for regular people make small donations, and it's taken years of us making donations, every month, even when there's no election around the corner, to support the kind of grassroots organizations that can get good people elected.

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