Campaign Donation Refunds: Perhaps There Are Also Unicorns

You've decided on who you want to support in the upcoming election. Bob seems like he would be exactly what the country needs. So you decide to donate to his campaign.

Then Bob goes off the reservation on you. He starts saying things you don't like. He starts supporting positions you don't like. You don't want to vote for Bob anymore-- oh my God, but you gave Bob money! You want a refund! Bob, give me my money back!

Ha ha, yeah, don't count on that happening.

Only rarely does a candidate refund money to a donor. If they do, it will almost certainly be for reasons of their own, most likely because they don't want to be associated with whoever the donor is affiliated with. Once you donate, you should pretty much consider the money gone for good.

Why would a candidate not give money back? Well, obviously the possibility exists that the candidate is unscrupulous enough to not care what you think as long as he's got your money. But there are other reasons.

*The candidate really does think it's theirs.

Which it is; you did give it to them.

*The money's already been spent.

This is by far the most likely reason you won't get your money back. You've heard how much it costs to run a campaign these days. You also have likely heard about how candidates end up in debt for some time after a campaign. It's not hard to connect the dots. Campaigns under competition are under immense pressure to use the entire warchest- and beyond- lest they get outspent and, subsequently, lose. The speed at which you spend over a given period of time is called your burn rate, and a burn rate only covers in-house expenses: salaries, taxes, fundraising talks. Any money left over after you're done burning goes towards advertising and voter outreach.

Many campaigns have such a burn rate that they have to take on debt, or inject money out of pocket, in order to conduct any actual campaigning. Since the whole point of a campaign is to, well, campaign, candidates often end up paying it off years after the campaign has ended. Hillary Clinton, for example, is still trying to settle her debt from her 2008 Presidential run. This can take a while, as who wants to donate to a campaign that has already lost? And in Hillary's case, it's doubly difficult, as high-salaried campaign advisor Mark Penn is viewed by Hillary supporters as a key factor in why she lost in the first place. The remaining debt would end up in the hands of Penn's legal firm, Penn Schoen Berland, and that's an extremely unattractive sell.

Not even safe campaigns are entirely safe; these politicians stockpile money in their off years, like a squirrel storing acorns for winter, and anyone willing to hand over some of their warchest to help out a partymate in need will usually end up in an improved position within the party during the next legislative session. Take this link, which shows a series of posts from the 2008 season pretty explicitly linking donations from personal warchests to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, to the prospect of getting to vice-chair said committee.

*The candidate thinks that it pretty much serves you right.

This is the camp I fall into. While you really should be voting regardless of the field- even if it's a lesser-of-two-evils choice- the decision to donate money is yours and yours alone. Who to donate to, how much to give, and when to give it. You've essentially bet money that that particular candidate will be the best for you and the country. If that bet goes sour, that's just too bad. If you came to like the opposition, why did you not choose better when you donated? If they changed their positions since your donation, why did you not wait until later in the campaign? If new information was introduced about them, why did you assume this information, or something like it, would not be introduced?

Which leads to a curious phenomenon. On the rare occasion that you do get the money back, considering all that... perhaps that's a signal that the candidate you just took your money back from is worth your vote after all.

The Post That Wasn't

Bob McDonnell, governor of Virginia, screwed up the post I was going to make today. So while I retool to suit new developments, please enjoy this Chuck Jones cartoon.

The Stupid Tax

You might note that the byline below the blog title is 'Be Less Stupid'. That's not necessarily a slight on you or anyone. Everybody's stupid concerning something or other. Everybody's got an intellectual blind spot. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you do your best to plug the hole. President Obama's a Constitutional scholar, but you wouldn't ask him for bowling advice. 'Be Less Stupid' is little more than a call to fill those blind spots in, to, well, be a little less stupid every day. If you want to look at it as 'be smarter', fine and dandy.

But let's discuss what happens if you fail to be less stupid.

It will cost you a lot of money.

You might have heard the saying that the lottery is a 'tax on people who are bad at math'. Fair enough. Tragic addictions aside, there are absolutely people out there that will look at 10:1 odds and think that if they bet ten times, they're bound to win, and won't even take into account the return on investment even if they do win. There are people that will bet on every number of a roulette wheel and then wonder why they're losing money.

It's something I've always known as the 'stupid-people tax', but for our purposes we'll condense further into 'stupid tax'.

A stupid tax can be defined as any payment of money that can be avoided through not being stupid- the stupider you are, the higher the stupid tax. Lotteries qualify. (I cop to buying the occasional scratch-off, so I'm not immune, but my stupid tax is still fairly low.)

Another famous stupid tax: the Nigerian e-mail scam, also known as the 419 scam, after the part of Nigerian law that deals with it. Scams can hit some perfectly innocent people who do think things through first and simply get tricked. However, the Nigerian scam is so well-known and so utterly ubiquitous- they warn you about it pretty much anywhere that specializes in handling money- that if you get caught out by it, you tend to get absolutely no sympathy. You in fact get pointed and laughed at by anyone who doesn't know you personally or has to try to talk you down afterward. A stupid tax of the highest order.

Not ethical, mind you. Very not ethical. Illegal and low. But a stupid tax nonetheless.

For the three people that don't know what the Nigerian scam is, you get an e-mail from sone dignitary or other- most commonly from Nigeria, hence the name, but it can be from any country- telling you about how they've had to flee the country and had to leave a whole lot of money behind. They can get it back out, but they'll need an investment from you to cut through all the red tape. Once it's out, you'll get a cut of the money.

The letter will be terribly written.

When someone falls for it, they will discover more red tape that requires more money. And more. And more and more and more. Some wind up sending their cars, some travel to Nigeria themselves (at which point it's possible to get beaten or killed). Needless to say, there is no dignitary, and the only tied-up money is yours. Odds are you got taken in by some guy in an Internet cafe.

As long as it's been around, you'd think nobody would fall for it anymore. But the Nigerian scam keeps working. Sometimes it takes a modified form, such as "winning" a foreign lottery you obviously never entered, and could you just pay some processing fees for us?

In fact, according to Snopes, it reaches back all the way to the 1920's in what was then known as the 'Spanish Prisoner' scam, in which you helped fund attempts to break a wealthy Spaniard out of jail, all of which would inevitably fail.

The story evolves, but the scam- and the stupid tax- remain the same.

Who falls for it? Well, for one, a former member of Congress. Ed Mezvinsky of Iowa was using other people's money to do it, which it should be noted does not qualify as a stupid tax. That's not stupid. That's simply tragic. A stupid tax is something you're able to easily avoid, and while Mezvinsky should have known better, anyone could have been taken in by Mezvinsky. Or Enron. Or Bernie Madoff.

A much more ethical stupid tax, and in fact my favorite stupid tax ever, has got to be kgb. Yes, these guys.



Let's say you don't know something. Doesn't matter what. You don't know how to, or are too lazy to, look it up, which, come on, what the hell is Google for. Or Wikipedia. For a 99-cent stupid tax, you, the stupid person, can hire a smarter person to look it up for you.

The best part: through your stupid tax, there exists the chance your query, and its corresponding answer, will be posted by kgb for others to look up, so that they might not have to pay the stupid tax themselves.

Until they do. In droves. So much so that kgb tried to get themselves a Super Bowl ad (but got turned down).

It is the purest possible form of stupid tax: the less you know, the more you pay, and the money goes from the presumably stupid directly to the presumably smart. It's perfect, and better yet, it's completely harmless.

And it can be avoided if you simply be less stupid.