10/14/2006

Air America filing For bankruptcy and campaign finance regulations

With Air America filing For bankruptcy, I was thinking about comments on Friday by Limbaugh, Hannity, and others regarding Air America really being a political operation for the Democrats and not a media one, and that got me to think about the campaign finance regulations. One way to look at it is Rob Glaser losing $9.8 million and others losing large amounts. Another way is that campaign finance regulations put limits on how much they can donate in hard money to help candidates. To make the analogy even more complete, much of the money given to Air America was actually given in the form of donations. Why not view these donations or losses as political donations to get around the campaign finance rules? The comments that it will probably cease operation right after the election only add to this point. One of the ironies though is that many service providers who are owed money that will never get paid back may have inadvertantly made donations to this cause.

This just shows how one can always get around the campaign finance laws.

2 Comments:

Blogger libhom said...

The New York Post routinely loses money. Do you think that it is a way to get around campaign finance regulations?

10/16/2006 11:30 PM  
Blogger John Lott said...

Dear libhom:

The point is the problem with the campaign finance laws. You can give 40 million dollars to run a radio program this helps your candidates (or to a newspaper), but you can't give donations to those same candidates so that they can run ads. The campaign finance regulations make no sense in what they forbid and what they don't.

10/17/2006 1:05 AM  

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