With less than a week until Election Day, do political donations still matter?

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Political candidates are always asking for money. A listener called in to ask if donating actually makes a difference so close to Election Day and what happens to donations that go unspent after Tuesday. We’ll get into it and answer more of your questions about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and why fines might not keep Meta from breaking campaign finance laws. Plus, Kai and Kimberly fill us in on what they look for when they’re car (or motorcycle) shopping.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

- “Did Money Win?” from OpenSecrets

- “The 2018 Small Donor Boom Was Drowned Out by Big Donors, Thanks to Citizens United” from the Brennan Center for Justice

- “Republicans Confront Unexpected Online Money Slowdown” from The New York Times

- “Supreme Court overturns law that barred Ted Cruz from fully recouping a personal loan he made to his campaign” from The Texas Tribune

- “Money isn’t leaving politics any time soon” from Marketplace

- “When a political campaign ends, where does all the extra money go?” from CBS News

- Strategic Petroleum Reserve from the Department of Energy

- “What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?” from PBS NewsHour

- “Selling the government’s oil stockpile while prices are low seems ridiculous … is it?” from Vox

- “Strategic oil release comes with guaranteed buybacks, but will anyone do the drilling?” from Marketplace

- “Meta fined $24.7M for campaign finance disclosure violations” from AP News

If you’ve got a question about the economy, business or technology, let us know. We’re at [email protected] or leave us a message at 508-U-B-SMART.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Let's get going.
0:02.8	29 past year.
0:04.6	Hey, everybody.
0:06.0	I'm Kyle Rizz.
0:06.8	I'm welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.
0:11.2	And I am Kimberly Adams.
0:13.0	Welcome to What Do You Want to Know Wednesday?
0:15.3	How we celebrate hump day over here at Make Me Smart.
0:18.4	It's where we answer questions that you, our listeners, have sent in and if you, our
0:23.0	listeners, have a question about the economy, business, or tech.
0:26.9	We can send it to us at Make Me Smart at Marketplace.org.
0:30.3	You can also call us and leave us a voice mail at 508UB Smart.
0:34.3	All right.
0:35.3	Question number one, day political campaign donations go.
0:39.1	Hi, my name is Jam.
0:41.8	I'm living in Thailand, but I'm a US citizen.
0:46.5	And I am curious to know if it makes any difference at all right now about donating
0:53.0	money to a political candidate or a particular party.
0:58.0	Does it make a difference?
0:59.0	And if you do donate right now and they don't use the money, what happens to the money?
1:05.2	Thank you.
1:06.2	Over to you, once upon a time, Washington, correspondent for Marketplace.
	...

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