Lawrence is onto something

by: Hank Kalet

Wed Nov 22, 2006 at 05:27:55 PM EST

( - promoted by jmelli)

I want to make a pitch for the public-financing scheme being explored by Lawrence Township for its local elections. Read my column this week from the South Brunswick Post.

Basically, the argument is simple. So long as local governments -- or any governments -- continue to use private, corporate money to fund their campaigns, the people we elect will be beholden to the money men and the policy that gets crafted will benefit money and not people.

Hank Kalet :: Lawrence is onto something

So far, we've tried an array of Band-Aids. It's time for somthing different. Lawrence Township Councilman Greg Puliti says

he thinks it's time to move away from the piecemeal approach to the seemingly intractable issue of funding political campaigns.
"Here we're trying to put layer on top of layer on top of layer and the counties are doing it, too," he said. "But there are always loopholes and you could almost go in any ELEC report and see an I that was not dotted and T that was not crossed."
Rather than continually trying to plug the loopholes, he said, it is time to try something different, to take all the private contributions out of the system.
Overall, he said, he expects the entire program to cost between $30,000 and $36,000 annually - about one-tenth of 1 percent of the Lawrence budget.
That's not a lot of money to clean up the process, he said.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

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Lawrence is onto something | 1 comments

Nice dream (0.00 / 0)

I would bet that if the good voters of Lawrence put this question to the vote that it would be defeated soundly, even though $36K is a tiny drop in most municipal budgets.

The percentage of Americans who check off that little $2 donation box towards publicly-funded presidential campaigns on their federal 1040 has dropped steadily since the 1970s.

Unfortunately, the only thing most campaign finance laws have done have been to make it easier for wealthy people to run and shut middle class candidates out (unless they spend almost every waking moment fundraising).

by: thecontrarian @ Sat Nov 25, 2006 at 14:39:16 PM UTC