One fabulously rich person (or a gaggle of them) would put X million dollars into a trust that expires November 9th. X would have to be very large. Probably several hundred million.Would it work? Maybe, maybe not. But I disagree with the premise. Why should we cap total spending? I like spending on elections. It helps voters gather information, and makes politics generally more salient. I like all of that.
The rules would be simple. You could choose a funding cap for all candidates, x, which is much, much smaller than X. Say, $100 million. Plenty of money for a modest number of attack ads, since the parties must have a little fun.
The key: If any one candidate’s super PACs raised more than x, then the trust would automatically release an equivalent amount of funds to the opponent’s super PACs. The trust would be ready to hurl all its money if it must.
If some process-oriented very rich people have "several hundred million" dollars that they want to give to make the political system work better, I'd much rather they provide "public" financing to House elections. Several hundred million? If that's in the neighborhood of $435 million, it'll finance $500K to each major party nominee in every House seat. In my view, there's no obvious reform out there that would have as positive an effect.
On a marginally related topic, I would very much like to see better disclosure laws and better disclosure enforcement. But, c'mon, we all know that Sheldon Adelson is funding Newt's campaign, and it doesn't seem to have made a difference to anyone. Nor did people turn away from Republicans in 2010 because of publicity about the Koch brothers. And rightly so; it's not as if Newt was hiding his support for Israel (or at least Adelson's version of what constitutes support for Israel), nor the GOP hiding their opposition to dealing with climate change. Knowing who was behind those positions was completely useless information to voters, as far as I can tell. I know that's not true across the board, and again I would like to see meaningful disclosure (that is, who the actual people or companies are who are giving, not the phony shell names, and in plenty of time for the press and opposing candidates to look at it). I just don't have a huge amount of confidence that it would make much difference.
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The Koch brothers are indeed as much defined by their contributions to paranoid-style politics as those causes are defined by the Kochs' involvement. But: surely it matters whether there's a whole legion of grannies/kids digging in their pockets for $20 versus one sugar daddy. In a completely disclosure-free world, we wouldn't know whether it was one donor or many.
ReplyDeleteYes, but.....
ReplyDeletePeople's opinions on numerous issues come from partisan cues. Climate change is a great example of this. A few years ago, climate change was accepted science. Now, opinions on facts are based on partisan signals. So, if the Koch brothers did buy off the GOP's interest, they bought a very, very powerful mouthpiece. (Not sure I believe that causal path, but if parties shape opinions, and parties have choices of what of their agenda to push or not, and money changes that....that's really, really bad.)