Jon Schwarz, Intercept - John Pudner, ... advocates “giving average citizens a $200 tax credit for their small campaign contribution to the candidate of their choice.” Pudner is president of the Take Back Our Republic Action Fund, which tries “to advance campaign finance reform that empowers voters and encourages higher voter turnout aris[ing] from a conservative, market-based political philosophy.”
A longtime campaign consultant, Pudner was a top strategist for Rep. Dave Brat, who beat then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 2014 Republican primary. He also created the sophisticated basketball ratings and prediction website ValueAddBasketball.com, and according to Breitbart, “has advised general managers before the NBA Draft.”
Jay Cost, a Weekly Standard staff writer, endorsed Pudner’s idea as a possible “foundation of a privately directed system of public finance.” He concluded that “After more than a century of bad campaign finance laws, it is worth a shot.”
To understand the potential scale of this proposal, you have to multiply the number of adult American citizens (about 230 million) by $200, to get $46 billion. With that kind of money flowing into politics, it wouldn’t be necessary to try to keep out money from the Koch Brothers (or George Soros); it would simply be swamped by much larger amounts coming from regular people.
It’s not hard to see why genuine grassroots conservatives might find this concept appealing. It’s simple, straightforward and wouldn’t create a big bureaucracy, it’s clearly constitutional and it doesn’t require the government to make decisions about what constitutes acceptable political speech. Liberals would be wise to start exploring whether this is potential ground for a right-left alliance to drain the stinking swamp of U.S. politics.
2 comments:
Sure... Republicans like things like 'deductions', and stuff. Just how would a 'tax credit' work?
Personally, I probably won't have to pay any tax on my income in retirement... Would I benefit from giving money to anybody? Oh sure, maybe psychologically, but what about financially?
Just aggravates the central issue of big media's scamming the public airwaves. One more way to get big money into a system that feeds corporate greed. There used to be comparatively little private money in the system back before Buckley v. Valeo. The last election under the old reform system, Jimmy Carter ran and won on public funding. The question is quite simple and obvious, and has been well acknowledged at least since Occupy Wall Street, either abolish big private funding or forget about the Constitution. You can't have both, and the framers and first 80 years of politics were clear about the grave danger of corruption to the republic, on the same level as national defense. Either Congress directly responds to the unelected Court's coup d'état against the elected branches and the electorate (which was the legal equivalent of Pearl Harbor), or the electorate can get a new hobby. This is simple: every candidate gets limited public funding with a limited campaign season. Let the public decide based on the content of the speech, not on the number of ad buys. If baseball were like politics as now practiced, there would be the game between the two teams (debates, personal appearances)and then there would be batting practice (funds raised with strings attached,ad buys), where batting practice determines the outcome of the game.
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