People say to me, “Hey Paul.” You’re always criticizing proposals for campaign finance reform just because they would violate freedom of speech and would even further squash political competition. Got anything positive to suggest? Well, yes, I do.
The way things are now, it’s illegal for any one person to donate more than $1,000 to a federal campaign before a candidate is nominated, and more than another $1,000 after the nomination. Who benefits from these tight restrictions? The gainers would have to be candidates who have a big money-raising infrastructure already in place. Candidates who have special interest groups already hustling to bundle contributions from their members to the candidate. Candidates who have lots of campaign assets already on hand and pre-paid, like franking privileges and office staff that double as campaign staff and so on … taxpayer-funded assets that sure don’t get counted as campaign contributions, no sir. Well, you see where I’m headed.
It’s the incumbents who get away with murder under the present system. If somebody with money wants to give a challenger a chance, he can’t just write a fat check. He must virtually become a professional fundraiser himself. The system helps incumbents, hurts challengers. My reform will solve this. I propose that we each be allowed to give any amount of money to any candidate we choose. It would be a lot easier for challengers to raise cash that way, that’s for sure. Yep. Let Americans contribute just as much as they want to whichever candidate they want, just as if we were living in a free country.
This is Common Sense . I’m Paul Jacob.