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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: JohnM who wrote (14831)3/28/2006 7:07:09 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 542441
 
Rather that it's much better than the present one in which large donors simply buy their favored representative, senator and off they go.

Despite the conflicts of interest or even outright corruption in our current system I don't think your description of our current system is generally accurate.

Your objection to the notion of private financing for initial efforts to become a serious and funded candidate is that it permits corruption to leak into the system. That's hardly a deal breaker since the amount of money required to become a publicly funded candidate would be well short of present requirements to fund a full campaign.

So you would set the barriers before public funding is reached fairly low. This has the advantage of maintaining the ability of public funding to reduce corruption. One disadvantage of this way of implementing the idea is that the public might be forced to pay for very extreme and odious ideas with their tax dollars. Requiring a higher level of support before public funding kicks in lessens that risk.

Would you ban private financing of campaigns (at least past the level for qualification for the public funds) or just make enough public funds available that private financing would normally be of limited benefit?

The clearest illustration, to me, at least recently, of the corrupting power of money is that portion of the prescription drug medicare bill in which the government is not permitted to price bargain.

I imagine clearer connections could be found. If that is the clearest then you don't have any good examples. There are a number of legitimate reason not to set the government up as a monopsony buyer.

The best standard is just how much of an improvement over the present system it represents.

To effectively judge that you need to establish the criteria you rate the systems by, and how you measure the different criteria.

While I don't think the current system is great I apparently don't think it is as bad as you do.
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