Mark Schmitt

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow
Roosevelt Institute Profile

Recent Posts by Mark Schmitt

  • Rediscovering Government

    The New New Deal and the Little-Known Transformation of American Government

    Aug 31, 2012Mark Schmitt

    The New New Deal isn't just another book about the White House or Congress. It tells the story of what happens when laws are passed and governing begins.

    The New New Deal isn't just another book about the White House or Congress. It tells the story of what happens when laws are passed and governing begins.

    What's the best book about the Obama administration, particularly on domestic policy? A few months ago, I would have recommended Noam Scheiber's The Escape Artists, but The New New Deal, by Michael Grunwald of Time, is not only the best book about the administration and its immediate challenges, but perhaps the only one that will (and should) continue to be read long after 2016. This post isn't a full review of the book (for that, I recommend Michael Cohen in The Guardian, but others are forthcoming) – rather, I want to highlight two aspects of the book that both made me feel a little guilty and got me thinking.

    The narrative takes place in three locations: at the White House, in Congress as it interacts with the White House over the stimulus, and deep in the executive branch of government. Grunwald is very good on the drama in the White House, as economic advisors including Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein struggled to find a formula to contain the economic disaster that was also politically viable in an environment where neither politicians nor the public fully appreciated the depth of the crisis or the logic of Keynesian stimulus. If his book has none of the contrived Oval Office melodrama of Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, it's because Grunwald understands the subject, and thus knows that the range of options – and the range of real disagreement -- was not that wide.

    He amply demonstrates that the great alternative-universe fantasy -- in which the stimulus could have been much, much larger and only political malpractice held it back – is exactly that, a fantasy. The miracle is that the economic stimulus, even if inadequate to fully restore the economy's lost output, was as large as it was, and managed to contain such a multitude of new ideas. Nonetheless, Grunwald acknowledges and digs deeply into the errors that the White House made, such as asking Romer and Bernstein to put forth a projection of unemployment rates with and without the stimulus – which may have been accurate in estimating the difference between the two, but not the overall employment picture.

    The New New Deal also shines in its accounting of the legislative response, particularly the Republican opposition to the stimulus -- or, more correctly, to Obama. Grunwald offers a good model for journalists that it's possible to do more than just transcribe something like, “Senator X said he opposed the stimulus because it didn't contain enough tax cuts and infrastructure spending.” When a politician's stated positions make no sense and are glaringly inconsistent, a real journalist can say just that. His parsing of Senator Judd Gregg's shifting logic on the stimulus as he flirted with becoming Obama's Secretary of Commerce is masterful, as is his interview with former Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican whose amiable rationales make even less sense than those of conservatives.

    But The New New Deal made me feel guilty in two big ways. First, I've on occasion made the argument that progressives don't really have an adequate set of new ideas, especially about the future of the economy. But as Grunwald shows, not only are there ideas, but many of them are being put into place as we speak, from the Race to the Top education reforms to the birth of an American solar energy and battery industries to the mundane work of weatherization of millions of homes and businesses to save energy. I didn't fully appreciate the scope of the changes to the Unemployment Insurance system, for example. It's far from sufficient to offset the lost potential from the recession; there's a lot more to be done to rebuild the foundations of a broad and secure middle class, and some of it can't be done by government. But the germ of the ideas that will build the future are there.

    Why has it been so easy to overlook that? That's the second point on which I feel guilty. Like most writers about public affairs, I tend to focus somewhat on electoral politics and on legislative politics and policy. Most media coverage is grossly overweighted toward electoral politics – that's why there are 15,000 reporters in Tampa to cover a fully scripted non-event. But even those of us who try to focus more on policy and legislation often overlook the big third dimension, which is government. Virtually nothing is written about the actual implementation of policy in the executive branch or in the states. Newspaper coverage is limited to a watchdog role that seeks out stories like the failed loan to Solyndra, which is how that one failure (which Grunwald shows was already underway in the last days of the Bush administration, under an existing loan program) could become the proxy for the entire stimulus, or as they call it in Tampa, the “failed stimulus.” Most federal agencies have no journalists at all covering them on a daily basis, other than reporters for specialized publications and industry newsletters.

    While there are books comparable to Grunwald's about legislation (The Bill, by Steve Waldman, about the early Clinton public service and education initiatives, Showdown at Gucci Gulch, about the 1986 tax reform, and the classroom classic, The Dance of Legislation, by Eric Redman, which is about the 1970s), very few continue to look at what happened in government after the legislation passed. The richest sections of Grunwald's book open up the internal politics of government: one great set piece tells the story of the Department of Energy's office responsible for administering weatherization assistance for low-income families, one that had been a “turkey farm” (a term commonly used in public administration to refer to an unimportant office to which useless employees are assigned) and couldn't even get funds out the door. Given an impossible assignment in the stimulus – to weatherize 600,000 homes – an entepreneurial young leader, Claire Broido Johnson, turned the office around and exceeded the goal.

    Such stories, along with accounts of the ARPA-E clean-energy research program and the Race to the Top education program, show that the Obama administration is changing government in ways that go much further than the “Reinventing Government” initiatives of the Clinton-Gore era, which focused mainly on government's relation to citizens, who would be treated more like customers. Creative, ambitious leadership is encouraged, and real competitions, like Race to the Top, are replacing the formula- or earmark-funded programs of the past. It took a while to get started (which is why some of it was ineffective as short-term Keynesian stimulus), but its long-term effects on both government and the economy are likely to be profound.

    To restore confidence in government, it is necessary to do all these things – to make government more responsive, imaginative, tough on failure but supportive of promising ideas. But it won't do any good if people don't know about it, and the phrase “failed stimulus” goes unchallenged. The New New Deal is not only one of the two best books ever written about government (the other is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner), but an acute reminder to every journalist, political writer and political analyst to pay more attention to real stuff of government, which doesn't happen at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

    Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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  • Social Security’s Enduring Legacy: Adaptability

    Aug 14, 2012Mark Schmitt

    On the 77th anniversary of Social Security, we're celebrating what has made the program so important and why it continues to be vital today. Mark Schmitt lauds it for its ability to provide security throughout tectonic shifts in our economy and society. Read the rest of our coverage here.

    On the 77th anniversary of Social Security, we're celebrating what has made the program so important and why it continues to be vital today. Mark Schmitt lauds it for its ability to provide security throughout tectonic shifts in our economy and society. Read the rest of our coverage here.

    If Franklin D. Roosevelt rejoined the living tomorrow, he probably wouldn't recognize Social Security, his greatest domestic legacy. That might sound like something a critic or skeptic of the program would say, as if it had broken faith with Roosevelt's vision or expanded far beyond its original intent.

    But, in fact, what Roosevelt would see would be Social Security's greatest virtue: its adaptability to changing circumstances. Social Security has survived, thrived, and continued to provide a base level of economic security not only through big macroeconomic shifts (such as the inflation of the 1970s) but also the transformations and uncertainties in our individual and family lives. That adaptability and continuous reexamination and improvement is the quality most in keeping with the experimental, pragmatic nature of the New Deal.

    Between 1935 and 2000, there were 30 major legislative changes to Social Security, roughly one every two years, under Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1939, it expanded its focus from the individual worker to the family, adding benefits for surviving spouses and young children. In 1950, it expanded to cover domestic and farm workers, whose omission was the atrocious compromise FDR had made to secure the support of Southern conservatives. In successive changes from 1954 through 1960, a disability program was created, and in the 1970s, benefits were indexed to inflation. Changes in 1977 and 1983 adjusted the financing of the program, changing the formula for benefits to reduce costs and build up more of a reserve (the Trust Fund) so that future retirees financed some of their own benefits. In 2000, the earnings test for Social Security recipients was eliminated. And while Social Security was created with the assumption of a male breadwinner, over 77 years it has been adjusted to account for the changing role of women in the workforce and the family.

    The point of this history is a reminder that Social Security is not a fixed, unchanging thing, a jewel of the New Deal to be worshipped. Rather, it is an incredibly adaptive, responsive structure on which we've been able to build several different forms of economic and family security and adjust to radical changes in the economy, family, industry, education, and expectations over the years.

    It's become routine to say that Social Security is an industrial age program that's ill suited, or at least needs to be modernized, to deal with information age challenges, but it's telling that this cliché never gets to specifics. It's true that the current era presents dramatic new challenges to economic security: household debt far larger than in the 1930s, 1950s, or even the 1980s (when most households didn't even have access to consumer credit); the rapid decline since 1979 in the number of defined-benefit pension plans; the disappearance of lifetime employment at a single employer; and, most recently, the high rates of long-term unemployment among people in their late 50s and early 60s. But for almost every one of these changes, there's an answer within Social Security that's as good as any other. We could address the insecurity around pensions by creating a universal 401(k) account, but we could do exactly the same thing, with far less complexity and hassle, simply by expanding Social Security. We could construct some new form of economic security for those who have lost their jobs in their late 50s and may never work again – or, as James K. Galbraith has proposed, we could make it less costly for people to take Social Security at age 62 (which a majority of recipients do anyway) and open up opportunities for younger workers.

    There are also liberals who hold the position “never touch Social Security.” They, too, should recognize the record of adaptability and change throughout the history of the program. There are bad changes to the program (such as an abrupt increase in the eligibility age) and less bad ones. But one way or another, it's worth putting Social Security on a path that won't require a significant cut in benefits, or hike in payroll taxes, in 15 or 20 years. I'm not endorsing any specific plan here, but just pointing out that resisting any and all changes to Social Security is really a betrayal of the program's greatest strength.

    There are programs that really are locked into a particular era and model of employment. Unemployment Insurance, for example, reflects some of the assumptions of the industrial era economy, such as a business cycle in which dips last about 26 weeks and workers return to their previous employer. But Social Security has a seamless versatility that has made it adaptable to all the massive shifts in the economy and our society since 1935. That, rather than any specific component of the program, is its greatest virtue and the reason that Social Security will endure. 

    Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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  • What Romney's Taxes Tell Us About the Tax Code

    Aug 3, 2012Mark Schmitt

    The real question isn't whether Mitt Romney paid his taxes. It's whether we want to make an unfair tax code even worse.

    The real question isn't whether Mitt Romney paid his taxes. It's whether we want to make an unfair tax code even worse.

    Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney last week promised ABC News he would “go back and check” whether he had ever paid a tax rate lower than 2010's 13.9 percent. He hasn't, and the questions keep piling up. This week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid repeated a rumor, attributed to a former Bain partner, that Romney had paid no taxes for 10 years. And in the New York Times on Tuesday, Michael Graetz, a former official in the first President Bush's Treasury, speculated about what might be in the returns. It's possible we'll find something in Romney's taxes that's disqualifying or suggests that he broke the law, but I doubt it. We're unlikely to learn anything about Romney from his tax returns that we don't already know – that he's a very rich man with a taste for cutting-edge financial engineering. It's what we'll learn about taxes that might shock us. The Romney tax returns are a rare opportunity to see how the tax code really works for the very wealthy and whether we want to change it in the direction that Romney has proposed or take it in the direction of real fairness and efficiency.

    Let's start with the possibility that Romney paid a tax rate much lower than 13.9 in some years, or something in the low single digits. Graetz says that's “plausible” but might be “perfectly legal.” If he did, he would probably have to show real losses on his investments, which would offset his gains. These might be “capital loss carryovers” from previous years. He had a $4.5 million carryover on his 2010 taxes, from which NYU professor Dan Shaviro inferred that he probably had more losses than gains on his 2009 return – that is, he had to “carryover” the extra losses to the next year. If so, it's possible that he paid very little in taxes in 2009 – a bad year on the stock market – because he lost money. It's hard to see that as a problem, though. If Romney really lost money, he had no gains to pay taxes on.

    But this also reveals another way in which the tax code benefits those whose income comes from investments: they are able to move their gains and losses around and use the losses when they need them to offset their gains. Most of us can't do that. With a couple of exceptions, as our income goes up and down, we can't move deductions that we couldn't use in one year and carry them over to another. We can't use our bad years to offset the good ones. 

    And then there's that massive Individual Retirement Account, valued in his financial disclosure at between $20 million and $101 million. How does that happen? Contributions to that type of IRA are limited to $30,000 a year, so these are remarkable returns. (The average IRA has about $67,000 in it.) The answer is that he's not putting cash in the IRA; he's putting in stock. The trick is to put in stock that has a low value but a huge upside. Graetz says that “we have to presume that Mr. Romney valued the assets he put in his retirement account at far less than he would have sold them for.” Apparently this is not uncommon – if you had just founded Facebook, for example, you could load up your IRA with shares when they were valued at $1, and then as the company grew, the capital gains would be tax-deferred in the safety of the IRA. As Graetz says, “The IRA also allows Mr. Romney to diversify his large holdings tax-free” – by which he means that if you want to have a typically diversified portfolio of high-risk/high-return investments and low-risk ones, by putting the high-return stocks into the IRA, you keep all the capital gains in that tax-deferred space. (I say tax-deferred rather than tax-free because eventually the gains are supposed to be taxed, depending on whether the Romneys withdraw funds from it or pass it on to their heirs.)

    More interesting than how Romney did it is the fact that it's even possible to wall off such a massive amount of money in an IRA. A policy that allows and encourages people to save enough for retirement makes a lot of sense, but this is way beyond what anyone needs for retirement. It's doubtful that anyone in Congress, when IRAs were created in 1974, imagined they were creating a system for large fortunes to be held untaxed, but that seems to have been the effect.

    There are two important points about the tax system that Romney's taxes, even what we already know about them, reveal: The first is that the creation of tax-deferred accounts can take huge amounts of investment income out of the tax system entirely. A major thrust of Republican tax policy has been to expand the number of opportunities to put money – and the income it generates -- into accounts that fall outside the scope of taxation. These include various forms of IRAs, health savings accounts, education savings accounts, and others. Many of them benefit the middle class, although they provide little value for low-income workers. But as we see from the Romney example, they can provide huge benefits to the wealthy. Any serious tax reform should aim to reduce the number and scope of these accounts in order to bring as much income as possible under the purview of the tax system and keep rates as low as possible.

    And second, Romney's taxes reveal how misleading just looking at the “rate” paid by Romney or any other wealthy person really is. When we eventually see the returns, we won't know what percentage of Romney's income he pays in taxes because we aren't seeing all of his income – some large amount of it is flowing through this IRA. Again, that's not a Romney problem; it's an example of how ordinary high-end tax practices make it difficult to even judge whether the system is fair or equitable.

    When we eventually see Mitt Romney's tax returns, I hope that the debate about whether he's a tax cheat or a mere tax-avoider won't distract us from the fact that we've created a tax system that doesn't make any sense and absurdly benefits the very well-off. There's a choice between policies that would take the tax code even further in that direction and policies that would begin to restore sanity and fairness.

    Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

     

    Tax shelter image via Shutterstock.com.

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  • Trust in Government as an Ad Pitch: Lessons From a 1969 Corporate Logo

    Jul 25, 2012Mark Schmitt

    It takes language that plugs into the national consciousness to change our attitudes toward the government.

    It takes language that plugs into the national consciousness to change our attitudes toward the government.

    A fascinating short film from 1969 popped up yesterday on a number of quirky non-political websites. It was made by the designer and filmmaker Saul Bass to persuade the Bell System to adopt a new logo, as well as new designs for its trucks, uniforms, and phone booths. If you're a Mad Men fan or are into design, or both, it's worth the 27 minutes to watch it.

    But what I found most interesting in it was a clue to the question we often ask, especially in the Roosevelt Institute's Rediscovering Government initiative: When and why did Americans lose the faith in government that characterized the era that began with the New Deal and continued through the postwar decades?

    In trying to convince the Bell System (the phone company before it was broken up into regional companies, such as what became Verizon, in 1984) to embrace a modern, high-tech (by 1969 standards) look, the voice-over puts it in the context of a narrative of the United States in the middle part of the twentieth century. Starting at about 2:10, over images of Vietnam, racial discord and harmony, the world from space, crowded highways, smokestacks, and symbols of late-'60s consumerism, the voice-over tells us:

    We’re fighting a war. Making a peace. Integrating. Segregating. Getting richer. Getting poorer. It’s quite a time to be alive....

    Then, after a little section about how it's tough for business because consumers of 1969 have such high expectations, the images switch to those of the Great Depression, with the voice of Franklin Roosevelt – “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” – in the background.

    Many of us here today remember when it was quite different. The pursuit of happiness had ground to a halt. Survival was the goal — just to have a job, but to have a job with security: That was the prize in 1933. How long a product lasted was more important than how well it looked. Wall Street had forgotten blue sky and was now talking blue chip. Down-to-earth, safe — that was the place to be.

    “Just to have a telephone was a marvel” at that time, the voice says. Back then, it was enough to offer products that were “safe, durable,” but now “times have changed, looks have changed... When young people are looking for challenge, we seem to offer only security.”

    And throughout, government is used as a symbol for the safe, staid post-Depression world. Over an image of the Bell System's motley fleet of old trucks, the film asks, “Is this the world's most advanced communications organization? Or the motor pool of the Quartermaster Corps?” At another point, making the case for snazzy new uniforms, the film declares that the old outfits looked “government-issue.”

    One of the great challenges of history is understanding how people in the past thought about their own past and what their history taught them. Nothing before Mad Men had made me fully appreciate that for people in the prosperous, fast-moving 1960s, the Great Depression was a real, living memory. The worst year of the Depression, 1937, was by 1969 only 32 years in the past – that's the same distance as between our time and the election of Ronald Reagan. But a typical 40-year-old in 1969 would be living in a very different world than that of her childhood – vastly more so than someone born in 1972 living today.

    And that difference had a direct bearing on thinking about the role of government. The security that government provided in the era of “fear itself” was by 1969 seen as antiquated, a reminder of a time that people wanted to forget.

    When we talk about declining trust in government, we often tend to focus primarily on political arguments and claims, the language of the California tax revolt, of Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and more recently the rhetorical argument between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama/Elizabeth Warren, the latter who both dared to point out the essential role of government and collective action in building the foundations for individual economic success. But the political language of a Reagan can only take hold when it connects to people's cultural assumptions and predispositions, when it connects to our sense of national narrative. Because it has nothing to do with politics – it's a corporate pitch, much like Don Draper's for the Kodak Carousel. Bass's Bell System film is a fascinating reminder of how deep that sense of national narrative that government was staid and outdated went.

    Today our narrative is very different. “Just to have a job with security” is again a sufficient goal for millions of us. The economic promise of 1969 gave way within a decade to a long period of stagnation, radical inequality, and economic insecurity. At the same time, we're still the children of that promise, resistant to things that are “government issue,” safe and durable, eager for “challenge” as well as security. Rediscovering government requires more than just a political argument – it calls on us to rethink how government defines itself and presents itself and connects to our deepest sense of where we've been and where we're going, much as Saul Bass asked the Bell System to do in 1969. 

    Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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  • Note to the Last Citizens United Denier: It Really Did Change Money in Politics

    Jul 19, 2012Mark Schmitt

    It'll take more than undoing Citizens United to reform money in politics, but there's no denying that it's had a huge impact on campaign spending.

    Matt Bai argues in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine that the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United didn't dramatically change the impact of money in politics. Claims that it did “are just plain wrong,” he says.

    It'll take more than undoing Citizens United to reform money in politics, but there's no denying that it's had a huge impact on campaign spending.

    Matt Bai argues in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine that the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United didn't dramatically change the impact of money in politics. Claims that it did “are just plain wrong,” he says.

    Bai's stance is not as deliciously contrarian as he might think. It is more or less the position I took at the time of the Citizens United decision and one shared at the time by a number of legal scholars and political scientists. I called myself a “Citizens United minimalist.”

    And, taking things most literally, that view was not wrong. As Bai points out, Citizens United was an incremental decision in a series of moves by the Supreme Court and lower courts that weakened any efforts to control the influence of money in politics. Leaving aside the dicta in the decision (such as the majority's suggestion that only quid pro quo corruption, and maybe not even that, could justify regulation), it was not even the most significant of those incremental moves. The Wisconsin Right to Life case that preceded CU, which first weakened the limits on electioneering communications by independent groups, and the D.C. Circuit Court's SpeechNow decision later in 2010, which opened the door to Super PACs, are probably more consequential legally. Corporations, especially big publicly held ones, have never been the major players in outside political spending, and they aren't even now.

    I still think some of the conclusions that are frequently drawn about Citizens United are overstated. I'm still dismayed to hear claims that we need to amend the Constitution or that the decision hinged on the idea that corporations are people. (It doesn't.)

    But Bai's stale claim that Citizens United isn't largely responsible for the explosion of outside money in politics is no longer credible. I realized that in November of 2010, when I wrote a piece with the title “The Re-Education of a Citizens United Denier.” At the most basic legal level, Citizens United formed the basis for the D.C. Circuit Court's decision in SpeechNow vs. FEC, and thus there is a direct path from CU to Super PACs.

    But more importantly, Citizens United seems to have led to a huge shift in cultural norms and assumptions on the part of donors and money brokers. Why didn't political money brokers use “social welfare organizations” – non-profits incorporated under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code – to facilitate pure political spending when Karl Rove formed Crossroads GPS? They were subject to neither disclosure nor limits before 2010. The law governing them hasn't changed – it's just the willingness of Rove or others to test the IRS and the FEC. There's a sense now that you might as well try anything. The worst that happens is that eventually the IRS or the FEC will come back to life, or the courts will change their view.

    Bai describes the view that Citizens United changed everything as “a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality.” That's not wrong, but what it overlooks is that it's also been a useful story for conservatives, lobbyists, and professional fundraisers and political operatives. Everything's changed, they tell their clients or potential donors. If you're not playing someone else is. And you've got to keep up.

    Bai doubts (but does not link to) legal scholar Rick Hasen's article this March in Slate, “The Numbers Don't Lie,” which used the rapid growth in outside spending since CU to measure its impact. Hasen's argument was that the combination of CU, SpeechNow, and the increased use of 501(c)4 non-profits (the social welfare organizations mentioned above) had unleashed a flood of outside money: $14 million in 2004, $37 million in 2008, and a projected $88 million in 2012. Non-presidential years show an even bigger jump in outside money: less than $1 million nationwide in 2002, $1.8 million in 2006 (this is less than total spending by a typical congressional candidate in a single competitive race), and then $16 million in 2010 post-Citizens United.

    Bai doesn't challenge these numbers, but says “there's another way to interpret this data.” Focusing only on the presidential years, he points out that outside spending rose by a greater percentage from 2004 to 2008 (both years before CU) than between 2008 and projected 2012. We don't know about and may never see much of the 2012 spending, however. Between 2004 and 2008, there was also a significant legal change, the Wisconsin Right to Life decision, which half-opened the door that Citizens United tore down.

    More notably, Bai's “another way to interpret the data” isn't really an alternative interpretation at all. He's basically arguing that outside money increases, period, all the time, whatever you do. In concluding, he asks Democratic operative Carter Eskew how much it would cost to run a national campaign now, including both outside and campaign money. Eskew quotes him a total of $500 million. Bai accepts that number: “it’s not clear that spending an extra $200 million or $500 million will really make all that much of a difference on Election Day.” True. But why $500 million? Without some actual explanation as to why a campaign in 2012 should cost roughly five times what it cost eight years ago, it's not an interpretation, but just a restatement of Hasen's data. Is it the cost of television advertising? Unlikely. Is it the wider scope of the campaign? Unlikely, since many large states that were somewhat competitive in previous elections, such as Pennsylvania and even California, are now probably locks for one party. No, a national race costs $500 million (if it does) because Eskew thinks the other guy might have $500 million. And a far greater percentage of that money is going to come through Super PACs, (c)4's, and other outside money vehicles than ever before, which are available directly or indirectly because of Citizens United.

    Simply undoing Citizens United won't suddenly bring us back to the comparatively innocent days of 2004 or 2006, of course. It will be difficult to put some of the changes in cultural attitudes about money in politics back in the bag. And the more heated political atmosphere overall may well result in some corporations or wealthy individuals, who previously hedged their bets between the parties and participated modestly, to jump in with millions on one side, as gambling moguls Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn have both done. But that's all the more reason to build a forward-looking alternative approach to campaign finance, one that incorporates public financing as well as changes to tax law to limit the abuse of political non-profits. It's not evidence that Citizens United didn't matter, a claim that was dubious when I made it in 2010 and is laughable now. 

    Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

     

    Bribe money image via Shutterstock.com.

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