Show HN: Uncover how your funds spend money in politics

https://www.yourstake.org/politics/

by mushufasa • 6 years ago

46 14 6 years ago

mushufasa3• 6 years ago

This is a simple tool to lookup the political spending of companies in the funds that you own, based on FEC data.

Our company produces data on the social + environmental impact of investments, and we thought shining a light on politics would be a cool weekend project. Have fun, and please comment if you uncover something interesting.

And don't hesitate to reach out via the contact form/calendar if you'd like to connect.

grissman2• 6 years ago

Funny, Alphabet donates slightly more to Republicans through its corporate PAC, even though Alphabet employees donate almost 99% to democrats.

dfxm12• 6 years ago

I have no idea how the "liberal tech company" meme started, but it is clearly not based in fact. Like any big corps, they don't care about red or blue, they care about green and will donate to whoever they think will help their bottom line, right now, Republicans are in power and they tend to favor big business in general, so this makes complete sense.

rtx• 6 years ago

employees donate almost 99% to democrats

Maybe due to this.

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

The upper management will use shareholders money to increase their own power at the expense of employees and shareholders. The Republican party is the one that supports looting public corporations. So that's who they give money to.

batterseapower• 6 years ago

This is cool. I wonder how they mapped the PAC organization names + individual contribution employer names to ticker symbols? Maybe fuzzy matching, or just a lot of manual work...

mushufasa3• 6 years ago

Yes this is a hard problem. This is our proprietary 'secret sauce' that makes all of our data work well!

One of the ingredients is lots of sorcery from the Book of Ken

oplav• 6 years ago

Do all individual contributions have employer data? I was always under the impression employer data isn't collected unless the donation is over a certain amount.

mushufasa3• 6 years ago

You're right. Looks like the threshold is $200 https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/filing-re....

cibyr• 6 years ago

https://www.yourstake.org/politics/report/VTXVX shows $0 for everything, but points the needle various degrees of left and right in the different tabs, and claims "Employees in your fund are Mostly Democratic".

grissman2• 6 years ago

Interesting. That seems to be an edge case of a fund of funds, instead of a fund that invests directly in companies. Other mutual fund search tools often run into the same issues with these types of target date funds.

abeppu• 6 years ago

This focuses on the party preference in donations. While that's valuable to know, I'd also be interested in seeing some measure of how total donations compare to market cap or revenue or some indicator of size. I.e. which companies are maybe lobbying too much?

imichael• 6 years ago

This is cool. I had a similar idea, but for spending instead of investing. It seems likely that, post Citizens United, directing your spending towards companies that are supporting politicians that you also support is probably more effective than making small donations or writing letters. When you buy a product, the political activity of the company that sells it are part of what you are paying for. If companies are going to play politics then let's have some transparency and let them compete partly on that basis.

stevenicr• 6 years ago

Would like to see a list of funds / brokers that use bloomberg terminal vs non-bloomberg terminal. I assume the list that don't use is small at this point - but any funds that use bloomberg are also contributing to the bloomberg empire and thus also putting money into moving the various needles he influences in different ways - or not.

A running tally of how much money has gone to bloomberg from the various places over the years / lifetime of the fund or broker house, would be interesting too.

Show HN: Uncover how your funds spend money in politics

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