Is Politics Good Business or Is Business Good Politics?

This past Tuesday, I received over 40 text messages asking me to donate money to the Harris campaign during, before and after the debate. The volume has slowed down a bit since then, but not all that much.

If I had ever sent a buck to the Trump campaign, I suspect my text messaging system would have been similarly overwhelmed with appeals for more dough.

And let’s not forget that since political donations are not tax-deductible, that every time anyone responds to such a message by sending in some case, they have added a datapoint to the information which the Commerce Department collects and uses to issue its quarterly report on the size of the national economy, otherwise known as the Gross Domestic Product, or the GDP.

In that respect, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s comment that the economy of the United States is beginning to put us down as some kind of third-world country, we are still the world’s largest economy, coming in at a tad under 30 trillion, with China in second place with slightly less than 20 trillion, and every other country’s national economy well under that mark.

I haven’t been able to find any comprehensive data on hos much Americans will spend responding to the kind of entreaties for financial support which overwhelm my text messages every day, but if we…