Yet even Senator McCain has now walked away from his previous self,mocking President Obama for “saying that the biggest problem we have is climate change.”
“McCain was a champ,” said Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, which tracks Congress members’ stance on environmental issues. “He would go around the country and talk about climate change. Even when he was the nominee, he didn’t walk away. But when a member of the Tea Party ran against him in the 2010 primary, he went south and never came back.”
.. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are wedded to defending a declining coal industry and advancing the interests of oil companies, most clearly in their support for the Keystone pipeline. Many of the party’s lawmakers and presidential candidates get a lot of money from people like the Koch brothers, who have multimillion-dollar contributions for anybody who will stand against efforts to curb the use of fossil fuels.
.. For the angry supporters of the Tea Party, opposed to government spending in almost any form, the prescription is anathema. “If you decide climate change is real, there must be a role for government to combat it. So the only way out is to deny it exists,” Mr. Karpinski said.
.. And China’s efforts to cut emissions have defanged the argument that it is pointless for the United States to act alone.
.. “People are afraid this is an excuse to raise taxes and expand government generally,” Professor Mankiw said. “We need to convince them this not a tax increase but a tax shift,” using revenue from a carbon tax to reduce, say, the Social Security payroll tax, while keeping the overall tax burden roughly the same.
Nonprofit Masks Source of Ads Backing Rubio
Pressed on whether he believes they should reveal their funding, Mr. Rubio said: “I think they should follow the law. And if people want to change the law to provide disclosures for groups that participate in the political process, I’m open to that idea, but that’s not the law right now.”
Here are 120 million Monopoly pieces, roughly one for every household in the United States.
Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.
.. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and Israel.
.. “It’s a lot of families around the country who are self-made who feel like over-regulation puts these burdens on smaller companies,” said Doug Deason, a Dallas investor whose family put $5 million behind Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and now, after Mr. Perry’s exit, is being courted by many of the remaining candidates. “They’ve done well. They want to see other people do well.”
.. Like most of the ultrawealthy, the new donor elite is deeply private. Very few of those contacted were willing to speak about their contributions or their political views. Many donations were made from business addresses or post office boxes, or wound through limited liability corporations or trusts, exploiting the new avenues opened up by Citizens United, which gave corporate entities far more leeway to spend money on behalf of candidates. Some contributors, for reasons of privacy or tax planning, are not listed as the owners of the homes where they live, further obscuring the family and social ties that bind them.
.. A number of the families are tied to networks of ideological donors who, on the left and the right alike, have sought to fundamentally reshape their own political parties.
.. Two of the donors live on Indian Creek Island Road in Florida, the most expensive street in the United States, according to Zillow. Richard Cavalleri/Shutterstock
.. The Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and even Mr. Bush have argued for tax and regulatory shifts that could subject many venture capital and private equity firms to higher levels of corporate or investment taxation.
.. “They don’t want anything from the government except that they’d like to export oil, and most of them want the Keystone pipeline,” T. Boone Pickens, the investor and natural gas advocate, said about his colleagues in the energy business.
Voodoo Never Dies
Even among self-identified Republicans, those who say that the rich should pay more outnumber those who say they should pay less by two to one.
So every Republican who would be president is committed to a policy that is both demonstrably bad economics and deeply unpopular. What’s going on?
.. So Mr. Rubio came back with a plan that eliminated taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inherited wealth, providing a huge windfall to the very wealthy. And suddenly he was gaining a lot of buzz among Republican donors. The new plan would add trillions to the deficit, which conservatives claim to care about, but never mind.
In other words, it’s straightforward and quite stark: Republicans support big tax cuts for the wealthy because that’s what wealthy donors want.