Citizens United Gave Billionaires A Chance To Enrich Themselves

In 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, all of America’s billionaires together spent a mere $31 million on elections: There were still substantial limits on dark money in American politics.

The dark money blowout came in 2020 when Trump was running for re-election and there was a chance the billionaires could seize complete control of the federal government. I Illustration: DonkeyHotey Flickr

That number jumped to $231 million in the 2012 and 2014 elections and more than $600 million for both 2016 and 2018, Thom Hartmann wrote in his Substack newsletter.

The dark money blowout came in 2020 when Trump was running for re-election and there was a chance the billionaires could seize complete control of the federal government.

They spent a total of $2.362 billion in that election, with $1.2 billion of it going to elect conventional politicians.

As Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) notes: “The report finds that almost 40% of all billionaire campaign contributions made since 1990 occurred during the 2020 season. Billionaires had a lot more money to give politicians and political causes in 2020 as their collective wealth jumped by nearly a third, or over $900 billion, to $3.9 trillion between the start of the pandemic in March and a month before Election Day.”

Hartmann added: “Billionaire fortunes have continued to climb since: As of October 2021, billionaires were worth $5.1 trillion, more than a 20-fold increase in their collective fortune since 1990, when it stood at $240 billion, adjusted for inflation.”

He argued that they made a profitable investment and bought access to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save them billions of dollars.

“While that $1.2 billion ‘investment’ in 2020 was massive, it totaled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth (and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth), leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire campaign spending,” he concluded.