A revolt among big donors on Wall Street is hurting fundraising for the Democrats’ two congressional campaign committees, with contributions from the world’s financial capital down 65 percent from two years ago.
[…]In reviewing the FEC records, The Post analyzed fundraising data for New York City and its suburbs in New Jersey, on Long Island and north of the city — a region that had become an outsized source of Democratic campaign cash. In the 2008 cycle, 28 percent of the two committees’ itemized individual contributions came from the region. Manhattan alone accounted for 20 percent.
In this election cycle, the percentage raised in New York is less than 10 percent of the total.
More than 600 regular donors from the New York area — whose four- and five-figure checks added up to $10 million for the DSCC and DCCC in 2006 and 2008 — have so far abandoned their effort to retain the Democratic majorities.
Take Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase, who is known for his close relationship with President Obama.
In 2006 and 2008, he donated $65,000 to the Democratic committees. This election cycle, he has not contributed at all to the DSCC or DCCC. At the end of March, however, he gave $2,000 to the campaign of Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is seeking to claim Obama’s former Senate seat. A spokeswoman for Dimon noted that he has given to individual Democratic candidates, just not to the campaign committees.
Other prominent Democratic donors who have not given to the Democrats this year include Leon Black, a co-founder of the $53 billion New York-based Apollo Global Management a private-equity firm, and his wife, Debra Black. The couple gave more than $200,000 to Democratic congressional committees over the previous two election cycles but have not given this year, according to the latest disclosure documents. A spokesman for Apollo declined to comment.
Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive and chairman of Goldman Sachs, has not donated to the Democrats, either, after giving $50,000 in the previous two cycles. A company spokesman declined to comment.
The problem has been particularly acute for Senate Democrats, whose previous DSCC chairman, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), had strong connections to Wall Street.
Wow, bet you never knew that big Wall Street bankers were all Democrats, did you?
First, Nancy Pelosi thinks that the productive people should pay people not to work. (H/T Hot Air)
What’s wrong with that?
Ed Morrissey writes:
“This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy” — No, it’s a net drain on the economy, although for understandable purposes. It reroutes capital from production to non-production. We are paying people who aren’t working by using capital that could otherwise go to creating jobs. It’s a policy tradeoff and understandable, although not for 99 weeks, which is what Pelosi is attempting to extend further.
“It injects demand into the economy” — Not at the rate in which the capital gets destroyed. Remember, the money for this program gets confiscated from producers and passed through the government bureaucracy to non-producers. What winds up back in the hands of producers is much less than what left their hands in the first place.
“It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative” — No, it doesn’t. In fact, it depresses job creation, which is part of the policy tradeoff. If this was right, we’d be at zero unemployment by now. Tax cuts, especially on capital gains, creates jobs by getting capital into the hands of job creators.
“It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country without unemployment benefits” — That’s not actually the debate. No one is suggesting that we eliminate all unemployment benefits. The debate is whether we will keep extending them further.
The trouble is here is that the federal government takes a cut for themselves whenever they redistribute money from one group to another. And the government doesn’t produce jobs as well as the producers they take the money from – because government is wasteful and inefficient compared to private business.
Hillary Clinton
Here’s a post from The Right Scoop showing what Hillary Clinton thinks of producers. (H/T ECM)
She says:
It’s important, too, that we look at how to promote broadly-based prosperity. One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity. It’s true in my own country where, unfortunately, economic inequality is increasing. And it’s true in Ukraine. It’s true in Europe and Asia and Africa and South America. So part of the challenge of economic growth and prosperity is to make sure it gets down and equally spread among people.
When you take money from the few, and reward the many, it also helps you to get re-elected – because you’re buying more votes. Pretty soon, you have half the population paying no federal taxes and the top half of earners paying almost all the federal taxes. Eventually, the top earners realize that they are being bled dry by the the preening wealth redistributors in government, and they scale back their production and hiring, outsource their jobs to other countries, or leave the country entirely. And that’s why unemployment is at 10%. It’s something that leftists like Pelosi and Clinton never learned – they have no concern st all about how the people they rob will respond to being robbed. And it impoverishes us all when we punish the most productive members of society. Where do you think jobs come from? The poor?
Barack Obama
The Detroit News reports on one of the reason why we all lose when government decides that they know better ways to spend money than entrepreneurs. (H/T The Blog Prof)
Excerpt:
The government is handing out nearly $2 billion for new solar plants that President Barack Obama says will create thousands of jobs and increase the use of renewable energy sources.
Obama announced the initiative in his weekly radio and online address Saturday, saying the money is part of his plan to bring new industries to the U.S.
“We’re going to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs and industries of the future are taking root right here in America,” Obama said.
The two companies that will receive the money from the president’s $862 billion economic stimulus are Abengoa Solar, which will build one of the world’s largest solar plants in Arizona, creating 1,600 construction jobs; and Abound Solar Manufacturing, which is building plants in Colorado and Indiana. The Obama administration says those projects will create more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.
That’s $1,333,333 per new permanent job.
That money could have created many more jobs in the private sector. But now it’s been wasted for politically correct solar power. And that’s why government spending prolongs recessions – it takes money away from job creators for fashionable boondoggles designed to get people elected.
UPDATE: The ONLY stimulus that counts is A JOB – or several job offers. People on unemployment are not going to spend because the future is too uncertain. What makes people spend is a current job, along with the prospect of other jobs if this one falls through. That’s what caused people to spend. You need to give tax breaks to the suppliers – suppliers stimulate demand by creating products that people actually want to buy.
But government spending can only be a bridge to private-sector investment. The key to a sustainable recovery and robust economic growth is to get companies investing in America. So why are they reluctant, despite having mounds of cash? I put this question to a series of business leaders, all of whom were expansive on the topic yet did not want to be quoted by name, for fear of offending people in Washington.
Economic uncertainty was the primary cause of their caution. “We’ve just been through a tsunami and that produces caution,” one told me. But in addition to economics, they kept talking about politics, about the uncertainty surrounding regulations and taxes. Some have even begun to speak out publicly. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, complained Friday that government was not in sync with entrepreneurs. The Business Roundtable, which had supported the Obama administration, has begun to complain about the myriad laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington.
One CEO told me, “Almost every agency we deal with has announced some expansion of its authority, which naturally makes me concerned about what’s in store for us for the future.” Another pointed out that between the health-care bill, financial reform and possibly cap-and-trade, his company had lawyers working day and night to figure out the implications of all these new regulations. Lobbyists have been delighted by all this activity. “[Obama] exaggerates our power, but he increases demand for our services,” superlobbyist Tony Podesta told the New York Times.
Most of the business leaders I spoke to had voted for Barack Obama. They still admire him. Those who had met him thought he was unusually smart. But all think he is, at his core, anti-business. When I asked for specifics, they pointed to the fact that Obama has no business executives in his Cabinet, that he rarely consults with CEOs (except for photo ops), that he has almost no private-sector experience, that he’s made clear he thinks government and nonprofit work are superior to the private sector. It all added up to a profound sense of distrust.
I think this was one of the points that really stood out to me in Amity Shlaes’ book “The Forgotten Man”, a badly-written book on the Great Depression. She spoke at length about how the unpredictable interventionism of statists like Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused businesses to get so flustered that they just stopped all entrepreneurial activity, including hiring, in order to wait the big-government socialists out. It ended up delaying the economic recovery.
And that’s what we see with Obama and his interventions into the free market today. Every dollar spend by the government costs jobs. Every regulation passed to control businesses costs jobs. Every line of anti-capitalist rhetoric costs jobs. Every Obama is doing to oppose businesses costs jobs. At some point, he’s going to realize that the election is over and he needs to stop scaring businesses in order to win the votes. Now is the time for tax cuts on businesses.
WINTERY KNIGHT 