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https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...nated-be-matched-under-house-democratic-plan/
Yeah, the article is more than a year old but the bill being discussed just passed the House and this provision is still in it, apparently.
The idea is that there would be a :Freedom From Influence Fund" established that would provide a 6:1 match for small donor campaign contributions up to $200. You donate $200, the fund donates $1,200, the campaign gets $1,400. According to this article (because trying to find the exact text in this monstrosity of a bill will take more time than I have) the tradeoff is that the candidate can't accept any donations in excess of $1,000. That's great. Big donors no longer have the influence they used to and small donors have a LOT more influence...right?
Well, not necessarily. Whereas my original cap on an individual contribution to a congressional campaign was $2,700 I can now easily make that contribution $7,000 if I play my cards right and nobody looks too hard. I can easily make a $200 donation from my personal account using my home address. I can make a $200 donation from a different credit card and use my office address while changing my registration name from, for example, "David John Smith" to "D. John Smith". I can make a cash $200 contribution using "DJ Smith". I can make two more contributions using other name variants and addresses. Is that legal? No. Am I going to get caught? Probably not. Heck, if I want to I can hand out money to all kinds of other people and have them do the same thing. If I really don't mind being sleazy and happen to be running for office I can pay a "campaign marketing manager" $10k and have that person use their "marketing skills" to convert that $10k into a $60k profit for the campaign.
So that's a potential problem and it's probably conspiracy theory stuff because we know that no campaign actually engages in finance fraud. Politicians are generally the best among us and only have the interests of the nation in mind. But there is another problem. The fund is supposed to be financed by a surcharge on corporate penalties and fees. That's great because it isn't coming out of taxpayer pockets...well, at least not directly, but it does create a political incentive for regulators to impose these fines. I mean, no regulator would EVER think "kickback" but if they happened to be the one to get the penalty on "MegaCorp" pushed through and that earned them a director's position then so much the better for them, right?
This bill is MASSIVE and it covers stuff I hadn't even thought of but this aspect strikes me as being REALLY problematic.
Yeah, the article is more than a year old but the bill being discussed just passed the House and this provision is still in it, apparently.
The idea is that there would be a :Freedom From Influence Fund" established that would provide a 6:1 match for small donor campaign contributions up to $200. You donate $200, the fund donates $1,200, the campaign gets $1,400. According to this article (because trying to find the exact text in this monstrosity of a bill will take more time than I have) the tradeoff is that the candidate can't accept any donations in excess of $1,000. That's great. Big donors no longer have the influence they used to and small donors have a LOT more influence...right?
Well, not necessarily. Whereas my original cap on an individual contribution to a congressional campaign was $2,700 I can now easily make that contribution $7,000 if I play my cards right and nobody looks too hard. I can easily make a $200 donation from my personal account using my home address. I can make a $200 donation from a different credit card and use my office address while changing my registration name from, for example, "David John Smith" to "D. John Smith". I can make a cash $200 contribution using "DJ Smith". I can make two more contributions using other name variants and addresses. Is that legal? No. Am I going to get caught? Probably not. Heck, if I want to I can hand out money to all kinds of other people and have them do the same thing. If I really don't mind being sleazy and happen to be running for office I can pay a "campaign marketing manager" $10k and have that person use their "marketing skills" to convert that $10k into a $60k profit for the campaign.
So that's a potential problem and it's probably conspiracy theory stuff because we know that no campaign actually engages in finance fraud. Politicians are generally the best among us and only have the interests of the nation in mind. But there is another problem. The fund is supposed to be financed by a surcharge on corporate penalties and fees. That's great because it isn't coming out of taxpayer pockets...well, at least not directly, but it does create a political incentive for regulators to impose these fines. I mean, no regulator would EVER think "kickback" but if they happened to be the one to get the penalty on "MegaCorp" pushed through and that earned them a director's position then so much the better for them, right?
This bill is MASSIVE and it covers stuff I hadn't even thought of but this aspect strikes me as being REALLY problematic.