It’s absurd that politicians are allowed to accept campaign contributions from individuals and corporations. Campaigns should be publicly funded.
The corporations is especially crazy. An individual supporting the democratic process makes sense. They are the ones voting. But a business doesn’t vote.
An individual supporting with hard limits to prevent a plutocracy makes sense.
Maximum monthly donation should be tied to minimum wage for 1 day of work. Realistically, who (unless you’ve got malicious intent or you’re rich as fuck, in which case I’ll assume malicious intent), is going to donate more than 1-20th of their income to a political party. Want to donate more? Choose a charity instead.
(And a bonus) this law would probably break the gridlock on increasing minimum wage.
The very-dishonestly named “Citizens United” fucked over We the People. Badly. Now, even Democrats and Independents have to also raise obscene amounts of money to match what giant corporations almost always throw at the Republicans who promise to lower their tax rates, limit regulation, repeal environmental and antitrust restrictions, etc.
If it’s not yet fully a capitalist hellscape, it’s well on its way there…
But won’t someone think of the poor corporations?! What about their free speech?
- Roberts, probably. I didn’t actually read citizens united.
I’m all for the corporate death penalty. Need a bailout, sure. C-suite is fired, assets seized, and corporation becomes nationalized.
Or something like that. There’s a reason no one has consulted me on the best way to accomplish this.
Campaigns being explicitly publicly funded would also have the benefit that if the fatcats want to contribute more*, they’d need to pay more taxes!
*while still not getting to choose who they’re actually contributing to, because eat the rich
It also stops what is going on right now thanks to Citizens United- foreign dark money coming in to influence elections.
Because Russia is very likely pumping a lot of money into U.S. elections and they’re probably not the only one. It’s legal, so why not?
Doesn’t that exceed political donation caps to PACs?
https://www.fec.gov/updates/fec-announces-2023-2024-campaign-cycle-contribution-limits/
The limit for contributions by individuals and nonmulticandidate PACs to national party committees has risen to $41,300, while the limit for individual and nonmulticandidate PAC contributions to each of the additional national party committee accounts has increased to $123,900 per year.
Just speculating here but it could be a joint fundraising committee donation. Basically allows a contribution to one entity to be distributed to many political entities. So the contribution limit would still apply but you can contribute to all people/pacs/parties associated with that committee. Doing some terrible calculations that would amount to like 1.7m if you maxed out contributions to every general election candidate ($3300 x 538) and excluding parties/pacs.
https://www.opensecrets.org/joint-fundraising-committees-jfcs
Fuck oligarchs, no room for them in a democracy
He can write all of this off too, can’t he? God bless America.
Sigh.
Fascism is not politely waiting to take over the U.S. and Putin is in on it.
