Monday, June 13, 2011

Campaign Finance

I've been thinking about the problems of plutocracy for a while, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover this bill.  As far as these things go, it seems like a pretty decent start on leveling the playing field a little bit for popular candidates without corporate support.  That said, it's only a first step.  Candidates that don't opt into the program would still be funded in all the usual ways, and I suspect they'd have larger war chests too.  It also doesn't impact the third party support ads that seem to be such an important part of modern election campaigns.

If I had it my way, every candidate would be forced to campaign under the bill's provisions.  Basically, you demonstrate that you're a real candidate by getting a whole lot of small donations.  Then you have your campaign funded out of public coffers.  Everyone get's the same amount of money, give or take the difference in number of $100 donations more popular candidates could procure.  There's no need to pander to the extraordinarily wealthy or to corporate interests in order to get elected, and poor people might be able to consider running (though of course they probably wouldn't be able to on account of needing "jobs" to "support their families").  Still, it would be a step in the right direction.

No comments:

Post a Comment