Answer to Question #35691 in Economics of Enterprise for jemin patel

Question

why do the government give political importance to the wealthy?

Answer 1

One mechanism which corporations use to influence the government is campaign funding. Campaigns for federal office have become very expensive today. They were not always so costly. National campaigns came to be more and more expensive as the country expanded. With the rise of big business, we began to see corporations donating money to political campaigns. The first political campaign involving a large amount of corporate contributions was that of William McKinley in 1896. As a result of the way his campaign was run, large amounts of corporate donations were made. After that there were attempts to clean up political campaigning. For example, Teddy Roosevelt ran a "Clean Government" presidential campaign, under the influence of early reformers. And in the following decades, various laws were passed on campaign financing. We won't go into all of them, but one of the most important of those passed early in the twentieth century was the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925. It limited both campaign contributions and campaign spending.