A Not-So-Crazy Campaign Finance Proposal

In an economic sense, this may not do what you think it will. Those who donate directly to a campaign, yes, they will likely be doing it out of genuine support for candidates. But I think what you would see happen is that corporations would no longer donate directly to campaigns (as there would be no benefit to them in the capitalist economy); in fact, it will begin to appear as though candidates only receive small direct donations, because those are the donors who genuinely support candidates. Instead, the corporations et al., will take that same money and make direct campaign ads close to election time in prime advertising and marketing slots (since the Supreme Court said they can now), or they will donate to 527s who'll do their dirty work for them. 527s have become excellent at "coordinating without coordinating" with their favourite candidates. So now there may be even LESS transparency than before, and these groups will only get more clever about serving their own interests as time goes along.

Sorry for being critical but not constructive up to this point. My suggestion, and I know it also has problems, would be that there be a form of progressive tax on funds used towards the campaign, or maybe even a permitting system for fundraising in a presidential campaign. Permitting is a little too complicated to explain concisely, so I'll just explain the tax. The tax might work like, "For every dollar a candidate in a primary uses in their own campaigns, s/he must also use x percent (maybe 100 percent) of a dollar towards each of the other primary candidate's campaigns." One problem with this is that there will then be more hurdles put in place to keep candidates from joining primaries (especially in smaller parties with limited funds like Greens, Libertarians, Constitution-ers). It also doesn't help the U.S. become a multi-party system anytime soon; a Green candidate with good ideas/ relatively strong fundraising will join the Democratic primary and get subsidized, as opposed to joing the Greens and being taxed. A bright side is that it should even out the big primaries; imagine if Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel had a campaign budget that was up in the Edwards/Clinton range?

On second thought, don't imagine that.

-Christan

That's ridiculous. If candidate x subtly makes it known that he/she supports drilling for oil in the national parks, the oil lobby can still get him/her the money to crush the opposition while maintaining complete anonymity. There's your "genuine support for the candidate."

Public financing is the only way to make elections fair.

I agree that public financing is the only way but that isn't likely to happen until we solve the problem of redistricting.

So long as State Legislators are in charge of redistricting they will protect their seats. The percentage of vulnerable seats in the '06 Congressional election was frighteningly small because of this.

Complicated funding schemes such as permitting systems or progressive taxes are costly to operate and vulnerable to fraud. Public financing is the simplest, most cost effective method to ensure that we have fair elections - that don't bankrupt us.

We must DEMAND that our State Legislators turn redistricting over to a non-partisan group and that our U.S. Congressional representatives do the hard work and give us "fair elections" - the title given to public financing in Arizona.

Blind trusts and publicly-financed campaigns are good first steps, but we must remember where many political candidates come from: corporate America. In the case of blind trusts, even if political candidates were prohibited from knowing the source of their funding, it wouldn't eliminate their bias towards special interests and big business. Many politicians have previous ties to big business (e.g. Bush Jr.) and will likely go to work in some capacity for the same, or similar business in the industry when out of office. Thus, although further regulation of campaign financing is important, so is ensuring transparency of a candidate's past, and conveying the importance of this to the general public.