With 'Stealth Politics,' Billionaires Make Sure Their Money Talks

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

45% : Though the billionaires barely showed up in the public record talking about taxes, for example, it was still possible to connect their sizable contributions to ideological political action committees and to candidates who supported issues like tax cuts for the wealthy, privatizing Social Security, reduced social spending and abolishing the estate tax.
43% : (At the same time, earlier research showed, affluent Americans tended to take socially liberal stances, supporting abortion and gay rights.)
43% : The few billionaires who spoke publicly about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion were relatively liberal -- and they felt more free to express these opinions because they mirrored majority American opinion.
42% : Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that these multimillionaires skewed very conservative on economic issues, expressing a preference for marketplaces and philanthropy, rather than governments, to solve public problems; some also supported reductions to Social Security and Medicare.
42% : "Among the billionaires that we studied, the 100 wealthiest, none of them are actually working to make taxes more progressive" -- and some even worked silently against the estate tax.
42% : Menard, who made his fortune by founding the Menards chain of home-improvement stores, was randomly selected from the 70 or so billionaires who never made public comments about taxes or economic issues during the period under study.
28% : Their near total silence on issues like taxes and Social Security is "almost certainly deliberate -- probably caused mainly by a desire to avoid offense concerning their unpopular political opinions."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.