The Kochs aren’t exactly forced to clip coupons because of their political spending
by digby
Lee Fang takes a fatuous piece of Wall St. Journal “reporting” downtown:
In her column, “The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs,” Strassel cites a Center for Responsive Politics list to claim that unions “collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries” on political races. Of course, if you actually visit this page on the CRP website, the list runs below a disclaimer noting that it does not include certain Super PAC spending or most undisclosed dark money spending, the preferred route for the Koch brothers for decades. In fact, the CRP site notes that union spending might appear inflated since unions’ traditional PAC spending is coupled with outside Super PAC spending. For the purposes of this chart, union spending is inflated compared to the giving of companies like Koch or Super PAC donors like Sheldon Adelson.
For the last election, Koch PACs spent $4.9 million in disclosed contributions (figures that appear on the chart referenced by Strassel). But they also spent over $407 million on undisclosed campaign entities, which does not show up in the CRP chart.
Here’s how it really looks:
And in case you’re wonder if that’s got the brothers counting coupons because they’ve blown their “savings” think again:
The following illustration compares an human being against a stack of $100 currency note bundles. A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house:
The Kochs have 75 of those rooms. The 412 million they spent in 2012 is a rounding error.
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