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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: TimF who wrote (14818)3/22/2006 11:20:47 AM
From: JohnM  Read Replies (1) of 542600
 
I just don't see any way to get a net benefit from public financing.

This post harks well back in the queue. But then I've been traveling. A bit more about that in a subsequent post.

As for public funding of campaign financing, I'm definitely not arguing that it's problem free. Rather that it's much better than the present one in which large donors simply buy their favored representative, senator and off they go. This is already reasonably transparent but I expect it to get even more so as we get further into the Abramoff/Wade public disclosures and trials. And, I expect, disclosures that have little to do with those two.

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. Even at the level of the House of Representatives, those numbers, in contested districts are very large. Not to speak of the amount of money representatives in uncontested races raise for their PACs so they can, in turn, increase their legislative clout by offering money to their colleagues in contested ones.

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.

No system is going to be perfect; any proposed system can be critiqued as imperfect. The best standard is just how much of an improvement over the present system it represents.
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