JT + Mayday PAC

This article was originally posted on the now-defunct my.mayday.us, for a 2014 funding campaign I was involved in.

Some background:

Hi, I’m JT. I’ve been working closely with Mayday PAC since the very start. I was featured in an article about it! Lessig’s Mayday Super PAC Scales in Google’s Cloud

Surprising some of my own family members, I guess I got involved with political stuff.

Along with a wonderful team of volunteers, I wrote a good portion of the web site source code you’re looking at now (in addition to all these words). I’ve been so involved in helping develop the site that I haven’t really had time to personalize my own explanation of my involvement in this until now. Suffice it to say this is a movement I care a lot about. So please really consider this info I’ve taken time to collect up!

Some stats:

Only 0.26% (not even 1%) of Americans give more than $200 for campaign fundraising.
Only 0.05% max out their individual campaign contributions (that’s no more than 150,000 Americans)
It’s even more lopsided with SuperPACs - 0.000063% (196 Americans) gave more than 80% of individual SuperPAC money spent in presidential elections so far.
Members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time in congress raising money for the next election.
Spending money to lobby Congress has a 22,000% expected return on investment.
Over 90% of Americans agree that money in politics is a problem.
Money in politics was a top issue with voters during the last few presidential debates, and yet neither campaign even mentioned it.
Congressional approval ratings are lower than the approval ratings of the English crown at the time of the American Revolution.

Some stories:

The government decided to make school lunches healthier. Healthier lunches means healthier kids, healthier kids means a healthier future, means healthier economy, etc. School lunch health is a pretty low bar to raise – can’t be that hard to get wrong, right? The school lunch proposal would have increased the variety of fruits and vegetables available to students and was backed by countless doctors and health organizations. Congress, pressured by lobbyists from the American Frozen Food Institute and others, decided to classify pizza as fruits and vegetables because tomato sauce. Heads explode everywhere.
Intuit, maker of TurboTax, specializes in making taxes as easy to file as possible. Except for when they don’t. As recently as 2011, Intuit lobbyists helped strike down two bills to dramatically simplify tax filing. Turns out, some very simple changes (already implemented in other countries) could make filing your taxes a one-step process, completely free from tax preparation help. One proposal had the IRS sending you what it thinks you owe, which you then accept or modify and send money back. That’s all. But thanks to Intuit, we are stuck with figuring out AMT and deductions ourselves.

Some blathering:

I’ve deliberately chosen unremarkable stories because it’s easy to confuse this with a specific partisan issue. But no matter which side of the political spectrum you are from, it’s undeniable that there is vast public interest in making the right decision (whatever that might be) regarding:

Climate change
Energy
National defense
Healthcare
Net neutrality
Economic policy
Intellectual property
Gun rights
etc

No matter where you fall on on any of these issues, as a country, the truth is we can’t have a reasonable discussion about any of these until we can talk about them without being warped by money, or even being suspicious of the other positions being warped by money.

If we can’t make the right decision regarding reducing protectionist tax preparation regulation, or regarding whether or not pizza should count as vegetables, why do you think we’ll figure out anything else? Even if you feel like pizza should be allowed willy-nilly in schools, whether or not pizza is a vegetable is not the discussion we should be having.

We have to fix this root issue first.

Some things you can do:

This SuperPAC aims to win elections for congressional candidates who support key campaign finance reform laws. We are fighting fire with fire, and we need all the fire we can get.

Instead of trying to get 80% of all financing from 196 Americans, we’re trying to turn the equation on its head and get small dollar contributions from everyone.

We will use the funding we get now for the 2014 election cycle and to prepare for the 2016 election cycle. We are supporting any candidate that supports any one of these reforms. Due to Citizens United, it may be true that the only way to fix the issue permanently is a constitutional amendment, but we’re taking baby steps to get there. In case you missed it, we raised $1 million in just under 2 weeks right at the very start with no advertising.

Anyway, we need you. If you have $5 to drop on helping actually do something to actually make the government actually represent you again, please let the donation box on this website know.

The time has come to stop feeling complacent and defeatist!

Thanks for anything and everything. If you want to chat or have a question or something, hit me up.

-JT

Some more explanation:

Some people who agree:

Steve Wozniak (Cofounder of Apple)
Jason Alexander (George Costanza)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (He’ll always be Roger from Angels in the Outfield to me)
Ben Cohen (from Ben & Jerry’s)
Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)
Peter Thiel (PayPal, also the Social Network movie (haha just kidding))
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)

What’s this about a “kickstart”, a July 4th deadline, or a $5 million target?

We’d love to make our July 4th goal of $5 million, and if you can help pledge to get us there, that would be truly beyond words. Many people have pledged conditional on refunds if we don’t make it to $5 million by that date. You can, too, but you can also donate directly regardless of our “kickstart” campaign.

We’re not stopping on July 4th no matter what happens. So, please help us keep the momentum going!

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