August 25, 2011

Big Labor to give less $ to Dems? Not a chance!

Frankly I'm surprised we didn't see what follows a LOT sooner:

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka announced that the labor federation--the nation’s largest--will give less money to Democrats in the coming election cycle.

Since this is extremely unlikely to be true, one immediately wonders what the catch is. And here it is:

The labor group plans to create a new "political action committee" (PAC) to spend money independently and directly, rather than donating to candidates. This would allow it to spend unlimited amounts of money on political activity, rather than being limited by campaign finance laws to only relatively small contributions.

In other words, the headlines on this story are deliberately misleading: there’s no indication Labor is going to ditch the Dems. They’re just going to spend their money “independently” campaigning for Democrats so they can sidestep contribution limits.

For corporations and individuals this wouldn't be very attractive, since campaign contributions are (or at least used to be) tax-deductible but independent advocacy isn't. But the unions are awash with forced dues money, and couldn't care less about the tax deduction because in theory they're non-profit outfits.

As I said, I'm surprised they didn't do this years ago.

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