Worst Communists Ever

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon and, like a geek, I’ve been searching aimlessly through http://www.opencongress.org/, which is a very useful collection of information for anyone inclined to obsess over elected members of the federal government.  Anyway, I started looking through the site’s Money Trail section, which catalogues all the kickbacks–I mean contributions–that members of congress took in 2008.

After looking through who got money from explosives versus who was in the pocket of the Amusement Park lobby, I ended up in the 10 subsection long Finance/Insurance/Real Estate section and started to notice an interesting trend.  At first glance Democrats appeared to have taken far more money from banks, credit agencies, and insurance companies than Republicans had.  Just to be sure, I fired up Excel and put it all into a spreadsheet.

Each section had the names of the top 20 recipients of donations from one category of business; however, I removed Hillary Clinton and John McCain, who were the top two recipients of money in all but one of the sections–undoubtedly because of the presidential race.  (Obama was oddly absent.)  This process left 180 names and $6,771,737 to divide up between the two parties.

After a few hours of tinkering, I got this:

91 of the slots were filled by 50 individual Democrats who took a total of $3,935,089 from the financial and insurance lobbies in 2008.  That’s an average of $78,701.78 per person.

89 of the slots were filled by 44 individual Republicans who took a total of $2,836,648 from the financial and insurance lobbies in 2008.  That’s an average of $64,469.27 per person.

The difference in money doled out to the two parties is small, and it should be expected that the party currently in power would get more from financial institutions and insurance companies, especially in the middle of a massive recession/public call for insurance reform.  Pointing this out, however, does still seem important given that many people–conservatives and liberals alike–harbor the strange delusion that Democrats are anti-business and anti-capitalism.  With how much money they have received from financial institutions, this is obviously not the case.