Campaign Finance Compromise

[Bosh]

For some strange reason I was thinking about campaign finance today and idea popped into my head. I've never heard anyone else mention it so there's probably something horrifically wrong with it, but it seems like a good idea to me.

Basically one side doesn't like people giving politicians stacks to cash since they think its corrupting while the other side thinks people should have the freedom to give their money to whoever they want, especially since its so easy to work around campaign finance restrictions (see MoveOn and Swiftboat). Lot of *****ing from both sides but not too many solutions.

How about this: people can give as much money as they want to whoever they want whenever they want but all contributions are required by law to be anonymous. This could be done by tunneling the cash through some kind of government office which'd collect the cash and then forward it to the candidate without telling him/her where it came from or any other method for esuring anonymity that people can think of.

That way people would have all of the freedom to use their money how they want but just wouldn't be able to use that to exert undue influence on politicians.

Makes sense?

[Zkribbler]

By "people" do you mean registered voters?

Or do you include bloodless, soulless corporations, vile PACs and foreign governments bent upon the destruction of the American way of life?

[pchang]

Politicians and Donors

would collude to figure out who gave them money by the timing of the gifts in response to the requests for money.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
By "people" do you mean registered voters?

Or do you include bloodless, soulless corporations, vile PACs and foreign governments bent upon the destruction of the American way of life?

The main point of PACs is to get around campaign finance laws so they probably wouldn't exist anymore. Foreign government and corporations giving isn't the best thing in the world but if the giving were anonymous they wouldn't have as much incentive to give.

would collude to figure out who gave them money by the timing of the gifts in response to the requests for money.

What if the giver gave all of the money to a government campaign finance office which then forwarded all of the money in daily or weekly chunks to the candidate with no imformation about where the money game from, when it was given or what kind of chunks it can in as? That way it would be hard to figure out where the money game from and impossible to check if people who say "Congressman I just gave you $10,00 now go write that bill for me!" are BSing you or not.

[Odin]

I already thought about this back in my 9th grade civics class.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Bosh: So long as the donor could prove that the money had been given (like the polititian has an aid physicaly witness it) then open bribery would still function. The concept of unlimited contributions is inherently flawed, it can not help but degenerate into bribery. Only a publicly financed system could be free of bribery.