Political Donations Can't Be Irrelevant to Profits

The Chamber of Commerce, in opposing a petition to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking for a requirement that public companies disclose all political donations, had occasion to state that it "believes that the funds expended by publicly traded companies for political and trade association engagement are immaterial to the company’s bottom line." This is impossible. Every dollar that a company gives to a political cause is a dollar it doesn't have, i.e. a dollar subtracted from its bottom line. Insofar as it's true, then, that political donations do not cause a change in anything else about a company's costs or revenues, the expected marginal change in a company's bottom line on each dollar spent on political donations is -$1. Now, companies aren't usually supposed to do things where the marginal expected effect on the bottom line is -$1 per dollar spent. It's kind of irresponsible, from a business stand-point. Even things like charitable donations aren't thought to have an expected value of -$1; the assumption is that having a decent charitable reputation will generate goodwill, and therefore sales, for a company. You could imagine that some companies might try to do something similar with political donations, trying to generate goodwill with a particular segment of the political market and thereby acquire a loyal customer base. But that, of course, depends on conspicuous generosity, not on secret donations with non-disclosure. How might dollars spent on politicking make up some of their immediate losses? I don't know. Perhaps the corporations in question expect to fare better in a world where their preferred candidates are in office, either because they think they'll receive favors or because they think those candidates' policies will make the world a better place for them to inhabit. But I'm pretty sure that, when a corporation makes a political donation, it expects to get recoup some of that money, somehow. And if it doesn't, it's making an irresponsible business decision. So, by the very logic of profits and economic self-interest, the Chamber's statement must be wrong: funds expended for political engagement are extremely material to the bottom line, one way or another.