http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/26/3418/Unless you ask the right question, you’ll never get an answer that’s worth a damn.
Failure to use such common sense is on prominent display in the debate over the pros and cons of publicly financed elections. We’re always asked whether the public should pay for election campaigns.
Wrong question.
The only relevant question is how the public should pay. Because we always will pay one way or the other. There’s no way for us to skip out on the bill.
We can either pay for election campaigns directly — as citizens in places like Arizona and Maine and Portland, Ore., do — or we will pay for them indirectly, as we do here in Wisconsin every time we all have to pick up the tab for another favor our elected officials do for their biggest campaign donors.
The direct way has a price tag attached. Depending on the kind of system you put in place, the cost for publicly financing state elections in Wisconsin ranges from about $4 million a year on the low side to $10 million to $12 million annually on the high side. There are about 3.9 million taxpayers in Wisconsin. So we’re talking about somewhere between $1 and roughly $3 per taxpayer per year.
Yes, the direct way costs millions, but it’s a bargain compared to the indirect way.
If you tally up the value of all the special-interest tax breaks, pork barrel spending projects and sweetheart no-bid contracts for state work that Wisconsin politicians have been doling out to their most generous campaign contributors, as Wisconsin Democracy Campaign researchers have done, you come up with a list totaling more than $5 billion a year.
That’s more than $1,300 for every state taxpayer each year. And that’s just state government. The same thing is happening out in Washington, D.C., to our federal government, only on a grander scale.
So we have a choice to make. We can collectively pay millions to have voter-owned elections, or we can keep paying billions for the donor-owned elections we have now. The problem is we never consciously think of that as our choice, because we’ve fallen for a false choice — namely that we can somehow get off scot-free and not pay a dime toward electing our government officials.
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