What Charles G. Koch Can Teach Us About Campaign Finance Data

Lasrick writes "Lee Drutman is a political scientist with the Sunlight Foundation who does terrific work. In this article, he attempts to trace campaign donations made by one of the Koch Brothers and discovers just how difficult it is to do: 'The case of Charles G. Koch is a nice lesson in just how hard it is to determine who is breaking and who is abiding by campaign finance limits. It's hard to make accurate tallies of individual aggregate campaign contributions when the Federal Elections Commission doesn't require donors to have a unique ID, and when campaigns don't always reliably report donor names. Given this, it is unclear how the FEC would even enforce its own aggregate limit rules. The FEC's spokesperson told me that while the FEC welcomes complaints, it does not typically take enforcement initiative."'

Comments

Why Koch and not Soros?

[JDAustin]

Is it because the Koch is considered evil by the left while Soros is a saint?

Yet the irony is that the Koch brothers actually make something in the United States and their workforce is 80% unionized while Soros is a banker who makes money on devaluing countries currency.

Re:If you donate to leftists

[FooAtWFU]

Since you ask? Media Matters for America, which isn't just a 501(c)(4) but a 501(c)(3) and routinely engages in blasting the American right wing.

501(c)(4) organizations are for promoting social causes; donations are nondeductible but operations tax-exempt, aka "if we performed these activities as individuals we wouldn't get taxed again so why should we be taxed as a group?" -- they can engage in cause-oriented political spending. 501(c)(3) are charitable organizations and the donations are tax-deductible and the organization isn't supposed to do partisan political spending at all. Then of course there are 501(c)(5)'s, aka labor unions, a left-wing favorite who are given very broad discretion to engage in very overt political spending to the tune of billions of dollars... but that's its own rabbit hole, and I digress.

Anyway. Media Matters would make an okay 501(c)(4), as they clearly have some idea of a social cause, but they go above and beyond that to get outright all-contributions-deductible 501(c)(3) status while their political enemies were denied any tax exemptions at all.