Shall Not Be Questioned

“Judge upholds Virginia governor’s Capitol gun ban”

The law is no obstacle where the powerful feel threatened. She ruled that there’s no right to carry a firearm on government property per Heller. That’s not a huge reach: Heller says government buildings specifically. But statutorily, Virginia Law limits the Governor’s powers in regards to restricting firearms. That is a reach. But if they find a judge actually willing to apply the law in this case before Monday, I’ll eat my hat.

Remember, when the wealthy and powerful want something, they will usually be successful at getting it. Bloomberg wants your gun rights. The key lesson here for other states is put the hard work Virginians are putting in now before it gets to this. Work to ensure the party doing this pays a price electorally. Sanctuary is a desperation move, and if you live here in Pennsylvania with me, or in Florida, we are not there yet.

I’ve done a lot of Form 990 analysis on this blog over the years, but a change to the tax requirements for non-profits gives us some more insight. Previously, the IRS did not make the Schedule B public, which for most non-profits lists any donor over $5,000, but for 501(c)(3)s lists any donor that goes over 2% of funds raised. Recently the rule was changed so that non-profits could submit their Schedule B without identifying information. This provides some transparency but without allowing the Twitter mobs to target big donors.

So Everytown raised a record 67 million dollars in 2018, according to their Form 990. According to the Schedule B, 39 million of that was raised from one donor. I think we can all guess who that is. But even Mike Bloomberg has friends. They raised 4 million more dollars in million dollar donations. That takes us up to 43 million raised from rich assholes. If you count the rest, if my math is right, Everytown raised 47.2 million in donations over $5000, leaving about $20 million raised in increments lower than $5000. Now that’s way more than Brady could have dreamed of a few years ago, but 47.2 million will buy you more fundraising muscle than Brady could have afforded.

Indeed, Everytown spent 2.4 million on fundraising. A generally acceptable return is $1 back for every 24 cents spent, so Everytown should have raised about 10 million just based on their fundraising spend. That’s assuming Everytown is getting average fundraising efficiency. I’d bet because they hire good people they are beating 24 cents on the dollar. It’s not unheard of to get 12 cents on the dollar, and they might be doing that.

If the rich assholes disappeared from the books next year, Everytown’s yearly take would be about 20 million. Ten million of that would be spoken for just in management expenses and fundraising, and the rest wouldn’t cover payroll. So they would be a very different organization with very different concerns were the big donors to disappear. I’d note that Everytown’s top paid exec is only pulling $350,000 (take note, Wayne), so they aren’t blowing a lot of money on execs.

Two donors pledged to them 17.6 million in stock, and they actually took possession of 1 million worth of pledged stock. But that doesn’t count toward their money raised: it’s an asset. Those are counted as non-cash gifts which is a different line item.

The Everytown 501(c)(3) is harder to tell, because the public support test the IRS uses is largely a joke. A $50 million dollar charity with fifty $1,000,000 donors is a charity with 100% public support. In fact, because that calculation is done over a 5 year period, you could sneak in a few larger donors under the radar without budging your public support percentage very much at all. The IRS also only requires that you count the overage over 2% of gross receipts, so if a donor donated $1,000,001 dollars, the million is public support. Only the $1 counts against it.

So what does the charity look like? Pretty similar in terms of dependence on rich assholes. They took in 37 million. 12.4 million of that came from donors who donated more than $740,000. So you’d think that means 67% public support, but that’s not how it’s calculated. It’s 82.4% for that year by the way the IRS calculates it. So a half a million dollar donation to Everytown Support Fund does not need be disclosed and counts as public support. See what I mean about it being bullshit? As they raise more money, more and more rich asshole money counts as public support.

How many of you could afford to donate $5000 to NRA? NRA’s 2017 Schedule B is 30 pages long, with 173 donors donating over $5000. NRA raised 30.5 million from 16 donors over $500,000, but that’s on $311 million in revenue. NRA’s biggest donor donated 18.8 million (who was that?). The next guy down was 1.2 million. NRA’s return shows a lot more depth of support.

March for Our Lives is funded by a small number of rich assholes:

The group’s 990 tax form shows another 38 donations totaling between $5,000 and $100,000, which together accounted for an additional $876,114 of revenue. The remainder, just 0.5 percent of total receipts, came from those giving less than $5,000.

It’s organized as a 501(c)(4), which aren’t required to disclose public support percentage, which I’m sure would be abysmal.

The Curly Effect:

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. We present a model of the Curley effect, in which inefficient redistributive policies are sought not by interest groups protecting their rents, but by incumbent politicians trying to shape the electorate through emigration of their opponents or reinforcement of class identities. The model sheds light on ethnic politics in the United States and abroad, as well as on class politics in many countries including Britain.

Gun Control is effectively being used for this purpose by the Democrats, and it’s probably not as destructive to a blue enclave as redistributive policies would be, since gun owners are generally less common in the upper classes, and those that are can afford to get around gun control laws anyway. Sure, you’ll loose skilled trades, but you can import replacements, and they will also conveniently vote the right way.

I’ve been saying the boogaloo will probably start in Oregon, but I might need to rethink that prediction, since it seems Oregon Democrats are smarter than Virginia Democrats.

Democratic Virginia Rep. Donald McEachin suggested cutting off state funds to counties that do not comply with any gun control measures that pass in Richmond. 

“They certainly risk funding, because if the sheriff’s department is not going to enforce the law, they’re going to lose money. The counties’ attorneys offices are not going to have the money to prosecute because their prosecutions are going to go down,” he said. 

McEachin also noted that Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam could call the National Guard, if necessary.

Call out the National Guard to enforce gun control? That’ll turn out well, I’m sure. That move totally has never sparked a revolution at any point in our past. These people are absolutely out of control.

So how does Governor Blackface think this works? How do you determine whose funding gets cut off? If a county prosecutor exercises discretion to not charge an otherwise law abiding person with violating these unconstitutional laws, does that trigger the funding cut? What triggers the funding cut?