November 4, 2005
This blog’s worth as a campaign contribution
Given the recent talk about McCain-Feingold and campaign contributions, the worry is that some of us might be exceeding our federally-mandated limit on “in-kind” contributions. Gullyborg brings up the problems inherit in determining the value of these “contributions”:
What remains unclear is: what is the “in kind value” of a blog post in support of a political candidate? I myself have logged some long hours putting together blog posts that support candidates I like. I have done this completely on my own, without any official coordination from campaigns. Am I “contributing” to a campaign? How much? The dollar value of the bandwidth? The dollar value of the man-hours of labor?
I had a US History teacher in college who drilled one fact into our heads. How much is ‘X’ worth? Simply put, it’s worth exactly what one would pay for it. If you’re selling a car, and someone offers you $8000 today and someone else offers you $10000 [but only if you wait until] tomorrow, your car is only worth $8000 today and will be worth $10000 tomorrow. Value is a very difficult thing to determine, because it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Given that the eyes of FEC bureaucrats can’t be trusted, of course, I’ll give a little bit of my own thoughts on the matter. My blog costs me about $30/year to operate. That’s about $8/year for the domain name, and $24/year for hosting. I’m using Wordpress, which is free, so I need not calculate the depreciation of a Movable Type subscription in the process. As for my time, nobody so far has been willing to pay for my services as a pundit, so my time is apparently not very valuable. So that’s a wash.
So, of the $30/year I pay, let’s estimate about 75% of posts that I write are related to politicians and/or issue advocacy. That means that I offer about $22.50 of “in-kind contributions” to various politicians and/or issue advocacy. So if the FEC really wants to come in and determine how much of that $22.50 goes to which candidate, I’m sure that an army of bureaucrats could figure it out.
I’d feel much better to know that several thousand tax dollars were wasted cataloguing how much of my $30/year counts as “in-kind contributions”, and to whom, rather than actually going to pay for legitimate functions of government. I feel like all that attention might make me feel that my government actually cares about me. But I’m not planning on reporting any of this to the FEC, so if they want to figure out the worth of this blog as “in-kind” campaign contributions, they’re going to have to do it themselves.
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This was a big question at the Virginia Political Bloggers Summit. One of the speakers actually worked with the political body (I can’t remember which one) that handles campaign finance. Basically the guy said — in VA — your only contributions are, like you said, your hosting and domain fees. And if these don’t reach some threshold (think 200$) then you don’t need to report anything.
He did say that as political blogging become more and more wide spread the rules would probably change. Someone did ask “What if you profession is webdesign/development, wouldn’t all of your time spent on your blog be an in-kind contribution?” The guy didn’t have an answer for that…