1. There probably are diminishing marginal returns, the question is are we at that point? The amount of donations solicited suggests the returns are still pretty good. The politicians don't take big money because they love the dependence - nobody loves it. They take the money because they expect the money will make them more likely to be elected. And so far I haven't seen any campaign saying "well, we don't need money anymore, thank you, give the rest to the Salvation Army".
2. That's true - however, if somebody can not find enough supporters that want to put their money where their mouth is - how likely it is this candidate would be elected? If the candidate is so marginal nobody want to back him/her - the public money would be just wasted.
3. That would only be true if other form of political campaigning were banned, which, as I previously said, is incompatible with the First Amendment. Otherwise, the candidate that does public funds + fundraising would win over the candidate that has just public funds, so fundraising will continue and the only thing achieved is that the politicians would get some free taxpayer money to play with. Don't they already have quite enough of that?
4. It's $5/citizen for one campaign. And that includes citizens that never paid any income taxes, due to being poor, underage or otherwise exempt. And those are quite numerous. Real figure per taxpayer would be much higher, and it's not like we have huge surplus in the budgets waiting to be spent. And, of course, as I mentioned, this won't remove money from politics - and it can not, since money is just a form of expressing one's desires, and if the citizens want to participate in the politics, giving money to the causes they like is how they do it. If you ban it, you replace citizens giving money to causes with bureaucrats giving money to causes. I don't think I'd pay even 5 cents for this.
2. That's true - however, if somebody can not find enough supporters that want to put their money where their mouth is - how likely it is this candidate would be elected? If the candidate is so marginal nobody want to back him/her - the public money would be just wasted.
3. That would only be true if other form of political campaigning were banned, which, as I previously said, is incompatible with the First Amendment. Otherwise, the candidate that does public funds + fundraising would win over the candidate that has just public funds, so fundraising will continue and the only thing achieved is that the politicians would get some free taxpayer money to play with. Don't they already have quite enough of that?
4. It's $5/citizen for one campaign. And that includes citizens that never paid any income taxes, due to being poor, underage or otherwise exempt. And those are quite numerous. Real figure per taxpayer would be much higher, and it's not like we have huge surplus in the budgets waiting to be spent. And, of course, as I mentioned, this won't remove money from politics - and it can not, since money is just a form of expressing one's desires, and if the citizens want to participate in the politics, giving money to the causes they like is how they do it. If you ban it, you replace citizens giving money to causes with bureaucrats giving money to causes. I don't think I'd pay even 5 cents for this.
>> Happy July 4th!
And the same to you.