“My expectations going into this would have been that billionaires were powerful, and that billionaires mostly work on behalf of causes that many Americans don’t support,” Lacombe says. Yet liberal billionaires have the same outsize access to politicians as their conservative peers do; they could push their own agendas. When “Billionaires and Stealth Politics” came out in 2018, Page says, multimillionaires who made political contributions gave on average around $4,500 annually; for billionaires, the amount was $500,000. “But then, among the billionaires, it was 36 percent.” Among Americans overall, roughly 18 percent make political donations, usually in amounts between $25 and $100. Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, was elected president shortly before the book was finished, so it had to acknowledge his rise to power.

Source: Forbes April 07, 2022 19:44 UTC