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Comment by pascoej | Hacker News Reader

Yang does have an interesting idea for campaign finance reform too. 100$ a year for any citizen to spend on political campaigns. In some ways I think this is bigger than the UBI. If everybody spent this voucher it would be ~23B, almost 4x what was spent on federal races in 2016.

I think it will be more likely that our elected officials make better policy for normal people if their campaign funding also comes from them. In federal budget terms, 23B is cheap to increase political participation / trust.

While it’s entirely possible that corporations / billionaires increase their expenditures to match, having “enough” money is more important than having more money in political campaigns (or so I was taught in school.)

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As you pointed out, special interests will just raise the value of a politician so the $100 disappears in value. That or buy out ads to convince people to spend on their corporate sponsored candidates rather than the ones seeking direct support from voters. Both of these already happen, so why wouldn't they happen more? Solving this issue of corruption in campaign finance requires a solution that only publicly financed campaigns can give. Make it so that voting is all that matters in deciding an elected official and sterilize campaign funding so it's not easy to corrupt.

The ratio of special interest funding would have to increase by 80x to outweigh the $100 by a factor of 10:

Currently, the $100 democracy dollars would outweigh special interest politician funding by 8:1, so for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction implies that political favors go up nearly 100x in price. That seems like an easy win to me.

Special interest money absolutely does not need to outweigh the "democracy dollars" contributions in order to be effective. It just needs to be enough to sway the vote of the politicians. Most of the time voters aren't even aware of the agreements their representatives had made with donors. This won't change with "democracy dollars." Politicians will gladly take voter contributions, but they'll continue to take special interest money until the laws change.

Different, but in the spirit of prior art, my state gives $2 per adult to spend on party campaign funds. (This is chosen at tax return time.)

[1] https://incometax.utah.gov/contributions/election-campaign-f...

Yeah I really like that you could support what you want as it gives more control to the citizens.

How? It does literally nothing for special interests buying politicians, it just adds MORE money into the system. No thanks.

Side note... not many people here would like the never ending series of populist presidents this would bring if it did work.

Let's say lobbyists pull funding from one sector and push it into another, such as the endless funding for military pulling funding away from other sectors like education, then you as a citizen that wants to support education can decide to put your $100 towards that.

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