Buying Power

With access for cash scandal featuring recently in the Cameron ConDem government in America the super PACs [Political Action Committees] are reshaping elections. The floodgates of unlimited spending were opened by the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which placed individuals and corporations on equal "free speech" footing when it comes to independent campaign spending. The high court's decision allowed super PACs to raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates.

The top 100 individual super PAC donors make up just 3.7% of those who have contributed to the new money vehicles, but account for more than 80% of the total money raised. The top 46 donors have given a total of $67 million, or two-thirds of the $112 million in individual gifts to super PACs this cycle. Membership in this select group requires a $500,000 minimum donation.

"American elections are funded by a very narrow range of special interests, and that has the effect of making our democracy look a lot more like a plutocracy" Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at Campaign Legal Center.

In 2010, according to research, 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households. Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent. The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.