Looking Back a Bit Further

In the last post, beatbox mentioned the Brady campaign finance data for their PAC arm and how much it has been hurting in recent years. I didn’t include that information in the initial look at the Brady finances because without diving into tons of very convoluted campaign finance reports, it’s a pain in the ass to break out by individual year as opposed to election cycle. And really, a year-by-year breakdown won’t give you any more insight that’s worth looking at. I wanted to keep the data sets in one post the same, or in the case of this post, similar.

Joe Huffman also piped up that he had some older 990s from the Brady camp, though it turns out they are only for the Center. Hugely useful data going back to 1999 (technically 1997, but missing 1998, so I’ll start out in 1999) for the Center, and he deserves a huge kudos for putting that together. But, because the Campaign appears to have been their core source of income until 2008, I don’t want to skew the data by updating only the Center’s numbers in the last post.

So what do the prior two paragraphs mean? Just that here is the data for the Brady PAC donation/expenditures/cash on hand for 1997-2008 (the 1998-2008 cycles) and the Brady Center revenue/expenses/ending assets for 1999-2008. (The ending asset is what I previously described as their cushion or nest egg, essentially savings they can dip into when they spend too much.)

Remember, these are similar time periods, not perfect matches. The PAC cycle includes two years that the Center graph does not.

For those of you keeping score at home, this shows that the “cushion” they could dip into when major legal threats come up has fallen by more than 67% since 1999.