OP-ED: Wealthy dominate political, economic spheres
There is too much money in politics. Money is spent on attack ads that don’t benefit society. The importance of money in politics also allows the wealthy to hold an inordinate amount of political influence because politicians need money to compete, and the wealthy have the money to donate. That buys access and a predilection for politicians to prioritize the interests of the wealthy.
Plato posited that for a republic to thrive, citizens should not have more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens. We are way beyond that; Elon Musk’s wealth is five million times the net worth of the average American. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
After the growth of corporate power during the Gilded Age, the Tillman Act of 1907 tried to reduce the influence of money in politics by prohibiting corporate donations. Reforms during the Watergate era also tried to limit the ability of money to influence politics. Prior to those reforms, Richard Nixon was getting bags filled with cash for his campaign without even having to report who was giving it ($11 million was collected in the month before the law took effect). In 2002, the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act again tried to limit the influence of cash. In 2010, the conservative Supreme Court undermined those efforts in Citizens United, and unleashed torrents of campaign cash.
The Supreme Court’s recent interpretation that money can’t be regulated because it equals speech is wrong. While money is a way to show preference, it is the amplification of speech, not the speech itself. People who are denied the opportunity to spend money on behalf of a candidate are not put in jail for their views, nor are they prohibited from extolling the virtues of their choice, telling their neighbors, writing letters to the editor, volunteering to knock on doors, etc. Denying money takes away a megaphone. And I think we all can agree that right now there are too many megaphones pointed at us (flyers, junk mail, texts, emails, commercials, etc.).
As our society has become more unequal economically, the wealthiest have taken an even larger role in the political sphere. The New York Times reported in the 2024 election 300 billionaires (out of a total population of about 350 million, so less than one in a million Americans) contributed 19% of all campaign donations. As Musk showed when he spent more than $20 million on a state Supreme Court case in Wisconsin and his candidate lost, money can’t always alter an election, but it would be naïve to think money has no influence; billionaires who theoretically know how to invest, certainly think so. For the ultra-rich, political spending is pocket change. Musk’s $20 million spent in Wisconsin would be equal to someone making the median salary of $87,000 spending $1.74.
Studies have shown that doctors who are given something as inconsequential as a free pen are more likely to prescribe drugs from that company. In 2020 89% of the House candidates who outspent their opponents won; in 2016 it was 95%. And there are pretty clear cases where political contributions have paid off handsomely; Trump initially thought crypto was a scam, but after meeting with crypto industry leaders he changed his tune and they became his biggest financial backers.
In 1913, Woodrow Wilson warned of the political danger of the robber barons: “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.” This was demonstrated when Trump was elected and Musk, one of Trump’s biggest donors (he gave Trump more than $250 million in the 2024 election) was essentially allowed to restructure many parts of the government as the unofficial head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE not only fired many federal employees in a failed effort to save money, but he also targeted government agencies that regulated his businesses, which may have been Musk’s primary goal.
Two economists (Zwick and Zidar) just published “Main Street Millionaires,” in which they argue that even moderately wealthy (worth $10 million-plus) business owners exert a lot of political power. They point out the revenue from these businesses surpassed all corporate revenue in 2011 (and continues to grow). On the House Ways and Means Committee (the committee that writes the tax code), 25% of the members are business owners, whereas only 3% of Americans are business owners (7% of the committee own car dealerships); in 2017, Congress passed an interest deduction cap exemption that only applied to car dealerships.
One of the tax deductions that has grown massively over the years is the pass-through provision made permanent in the Big Beautiful Bill (which exempts up to 20% of pass-through income); it will cost an estimated $737 billion in lost revenue (over 10 years) and 65% of the benefits go to the top 10% of taxpayers.
Robert Reich astutely points out that while wealth is not a zero sum game, power is. One of the major objectives the founders had in writing the Constitution was to limit the amount of power one person can accumulate. Since the 1980s, the economic elites have increasingly gained political power as well. For our democratic republican to function, it is important to limit the concentration of power. Hawaii has found a way to limit corporate power by using the state’s authority over corporations to prohibit them from political spending. This gets around the Citizens United ruling because it’s part of the states’ management of their corporations (a similar provision is on the ballot in Montana in November). Public financing of elections allows non-wealthy candidates to participate.
We need policies like these to restore a healthy balance of interests that help a democracy function and to prevent the wealthy from dominating the political as well as the economic sphere.
Kent James, of East Washington, has a doctorate in history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University.