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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (14591)	3/13/2006 10:56:21 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 542939

I expected you to have problems with the first of my points, the need for an independent commission to make decisions as to who qualifies I focused on the criteria because coming up with valid ones at the moment is beyond my imagination. Once the criteria were established, which I assume would be in law, then there would need to be some bureaucrats to administer the program. I would assume they would be located in the executive branch. I don't know why you you would make it an independent commission. You don't need independence when there are no real decisions to be made, particularly with some sort of an appeals process. So I question the independent commission. But I think the location of the bureaucracy would be a minor concern compared with coming up with the criteria. I like to think I'm pretty good at envisioning systems. The people who paid me to do that thought so. So if I can't easily come up with some idea of how something might work, I can't help but have questions about the feasibility. Lack of suitable criteria is the potential deal breaker in this issue. There may be legal deal breakers, too, but I'm not a lawyer so my head doesn't go there the same way it does to system design.

To: JohnM who wrote (14591)	3/21/2006 8:10:58 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542939

I haven't responded to the earlier posts in this conversation because I didn't see any of them until now, and because Karen covered one of my main concerns. I just don't see any way to get a net benefit from public financing. If you require private financing of the effort to become "a serious candidate" then you reduce or eliminate the potential corruption reducing element of public financing. If you provide public financing for all declared candidates then I suppose I'll go ahead and become a candidate, esp. if I can take a salary to manage my own campaign. I do have one additional objection. If you disallow private financing then your greatly restrict free speech. This is true even if you only disallow private third party financing and is even more true if you don't allow people to spend money on their own campaign. If you don't disallow private financing then public financing has to be very lavish to overwhelm private financing and provide a possible corruption reducing effect. Other lesser concerns are the possibility that the corruption reduction is exaggerated, perhaps greatly so, and the possible cost of the program. Neither of those are deal breakers, but I think the other objections are. Tim