Elections are in the public interest and therefore should be publicly funded -- exclusively.
Each registered candidate with more than a certain number of signatures of support should be given a budget of money and pre-paid airtime on all major networks by the FEC, and that's it. Once it's out, it's out. All other contributions (including in-kind) to political campaigns are tantamount to bribery and should just be illegal.
"Should" is a very easy word to throw out. Yeah, elections should be all those things. The problem is the follow up questions of "how?", "what would the unintended consequences be?" and "can we enforce this objectively when the situation gets murky?".
It seems all but impossible to stop billionaires like Koch waging public relations campaigns. If nothing else they'll just buy entire media companies (c.f. Bezos and the Washington Post) and jump in to the fray Fox News style.
It is pretty likely that no-money-in-politics rules would be weaponised against smaller donators. I'm sure there are a bunch of wealthy people who would love nothing more than legal tools to shut down donation-driven groups like the Black Lives Matter website.
Not impossible at all. This is a solved problem in much of Europe. Read about France’s election process. The problem is that elected officials in the US don’t have much incentive to represent the will of their constituency — only their donors. And their donors do not want campaign finance reform because it eliminates their influence. This is not a logistics issue, it’s a corruption issue.
How do you think Europe/France solves for the Bezos-WaPo "problem" whereby wealthy individuals can convert money into political influence indirectly by controlling media companies?
The media laws make it harder to spout propaganda, and the media regulators don't allow these people to buy media, and also well funded public media organisations.
Is it possible? Yes. That's exactly how countries with a post-beta implementation of democracy are doing things and it works well enough (it's never perfect). The only unknown is a migration path for the USA, so many with disproportionate power in the current system would fight that change tooth and nail.
It's pretty straightforward to spot billion dollar ad campaigns. The FCC has carried out its duty to regulate airtime for the better part of a century.
> Elections are in the public interest and therefore should be publicly funded -- exclusively.
So me, as a private citizen, should be outlawed from making a sign on my front yard in support of a candidate with my own money? Should I be prevented from making my own website in support of issues and candidates I care about? Can I create YouTube videos with my own money to support issues and candidates I care about with my own money? This is supporting a candidate with funds outside of the public funds -- clearly illegal under your proposal! At what point is it no longer individuals expressing their own opinions in public?
Parties are allowed donations, but they can't spend more than x on election campaigns, no matter where the money is coming from.
Time on public TV is kind-of regulated.
TV ads are not really a thing, mostly billboards and print.
Can be circumvented though, since it requires parties to declare spendings correctly (and labelled correctly). "Oh, those fancy pens that look like merch? For work if course!" "We didn't rent this venue, a party-friend did"
Difficult to enforce with all the possible loopholes.
> What about completely anonymous donations? If the receiver doesn't know who is giving the money, how could it act as a bribe?
It would be pretty hard to set things up so that donations were not only anonymous, but non-verifiable (as in, it should be impossible for a donor to prove to a recipient that they were the one who donated). This attribute in voting systems is part of 'coercion resistance' (as in, if you can't prove how you voted even when you want to, there is no point in trying to coerce you into voting a particular way). In a payments system, we can call it 'corruption resistance'.
I can’t think of anything in the public interest that shouldn’t be publicly funded. I would go so far as to say that’s the only class of thing that should be publicly funded. Did you have something in mind?
Re: completely anonymous donations, you mean, like Bitcoin? Generally any legitimate business has to report where it’s money came from - even if just for tax purposes - otherwise it’s a whole new crime. Remember, under my model, all contributions would be banned. Then, candidates would have to compete on platforms instead of fundraising.
It's an interesting question. Celebrity endorsements in the USA are big money. E.g. Kim kardashian supposedly charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single instagram endorsement.
His argument that people should be empowered to engage with the democratic process is ridiculous... Just because we want people to engage, doesn't mean that billionaires should have orders of magnitude more influence when they do "engage" than other people do.
How do you decide how much wealth someone can have? If you say let's do it democratically who's involved in that democratic decision? The people who's wealth is going to be ... eh, uncontrolled? And is it undemocratic if they decide they don't want that? Isn't it possible that we're actually doing what you want - stopping people from having undemocratic control over wealth but we just put the line over how much in a different place then you seemingly want to?
This last round of elections showed how money doesn't buy elections as easily as you'd think. Democrats massively over-spent Republicans, and what did it get them? A narrow Biden win, a smaller lead in the house, and a smaller gap in the Senate. Bloomberg's image and as businessman and politician is pretty strong, but for all his spending, the only votes he won in the primary were form American Samoa.
I feel the same way. I am a voluntarist so I do not think forced wealth redistribution is the answer. But it’s clear to me that there are ways we can move to different businesses structures and property norms so that massive wealth has a tendency to be distributed throughout the population rather than concentrating in few hands.
It’s a challenge, for sure. And some proposed solutions may cause more harm that good. But it’s absurd to me the level of wealth inequality we have today. That there are individual humans worth over a billion dollars while so many even in developed nations are hungry and overworked.
More cooperatively owned firms and less intellectual property control are two voluntarist ways we can reduce this inequality.
This isn’t true. To take the US tax system as an example it’s much more progressive than the flat tax starter you’re describing, where all income is taxed at the same rate. This does not stop inequality.
> In 2016, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers—those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) below $40,078—earned 11.6 percent of total AGI. However, this group of taxpayers paid just 3 percent of all income taxes in 2016.
> In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $480,804 and above), earned 19.7 percent of all AGI in 2016, and paid 37.3 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined, who paid 30.5 percent of all income taxes.
In a 2007 interview, Buffett explained that he took a survey of his employees and compared their tax rates to his. All told, he found that while he paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, the average tax rate for people in his office was 32.9%.
....
So why is it that Buffett himself doesn't pay more tax? It's because the bulk of his income comes from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income.
Supposedly if dividends and capital gains were taxed at the same rate as personal income, capital would just go to countries where it's taxed at a lower rate. Supposedly.
I don't think everyone paying the same income tax is what people usually advocate for, but everyone actually paying the full share of the tax.
I think a flat 20% above a certain rate is probably the most 'fair', but what needs to change is remove most loopholes that exist now. So everyone above a certain income level pays the same proportion of their income.
Of course the tax base ends up really top heavy, if you earn most of the income, you pay most of the tax. That seems fair to me.
> it’s much more progressive than the flat tax starter you’re describing
No, "flat tax" is not what I'm describing or advocating.
Did you know that Warren Buffet paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, whilst the average tax rate for ordinary American office workers in his office was 32.9%?
Nope. Marginal propensity to spend kills that out of the gate. Poor people save a much smaller proportion of their income than rich people, on average. Since rich people are rich (meaning that percentage is out of a bigger pie than the poor person's), and their savings rates are higher than poor people, you just multiply that out and see that rich people will get richer much faster than poor people.
This doesn't take into account taxes, however, which means that we're assuming a 0% flat tax rate. But, you see, what happens is that if you start imposing a positive taxation rate, then all that changes in the preceding argument is the definition of who is "rich" and who is "poor." The general trend is all that matters.
One actual limitation to point out is that this argument doesn't take investment into account. Over long enough time periods, all major asset classes have a positive expected return, so, it doesn't matter precisely what people invest in. What does matter is how much they have to invest, and how long "long enough" time periods are.
IIRC, for the stock market, "long enough" means 15 years or so. Since this is much shorter than a single human lifetime, you see that all someone who is rich enough to invest has to do is just keep shovelling money into their brokerage account, and it will pay off eventually.
Poor people don't even get to that point. The hows and whys of that are myriad, so I won't even get into that. Just imagine that, instead of calling them "poor people," we call them "economically fragile" people. Then, what you start to realize is that a small bump in the road, like, say, an unexpected car repair, can really devastate an economically fragile person's finances.
And, because economically fragile people don't have a lot of money coming in, their expenses are pretty low. That means that even if they follow standard personal finance advice and try to accumulate a 6 month emergency fund, a car repair costs what a car repair costs, so it's going to eat a much larger chunk of that emergency fund for the economically fragile person than the non-economically fragile person.
Oh, and, because economic fragility is relative (meaning if you, and everybody else have 1 quatloo each and I have 10 quatloos, I'm still as "rich" overall as if everybody had 10 quatloos each, and I had 100), that means starting poor and getting rich takes a long, long time, and may not ever happen.
TL;DR: A completely flat tax rate for all citizens implies that the rich will get richer, and the poor will stay fairly poor.
What really riles me about taxation is that generally people who work longer/harder/smarter to increase their net worth get taxed far more than those who increase it because they have a spare 50k they put into the stock market.
For a just society we should tax working far less than taxing capital and dividend gains, not the opposite.
From "Wall Street" (1987) [a work of fiction which I have no reason to take at face value regarding precise statistics, but nevertheless]:
"The richest one percent of this country owns half the country's wealth: 5 trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds of it comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulation to widows and idiot sons and what I do -- stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. Ninety percent of the American people have little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, Buddy, the news, war, peace, famine, upheaval; the cost of a paper clip. (picking one up) We pull the rabbit out of the hat while everybody else sits around their whole life wondering how we did it..."
As long as they aren't in a tax bracket over 100%, then, "work[ing] longer / harder / smarter," in fact does result in increasing their net worth. What's the problem, then? That we are asking them to contribute to promoting the general welfare?
The problem is that when someone works longer/harder/smarter for 1k, they get more taken in tax than if someone gambles on the stock market and makes 1k. That's the wrong way round.
But they don’t pay tax at the same rate, because once they get wealthy they buy enough influence to tip the scales in their favor. Which is why I advocate for more collectively owned firms. Then wealth goes directly to the people rather than going to a rich CEO and shareholders and then the government and then eventually maybe the people.
It's possible, though, that this small proportion of wealth has a disproportionate effect on the political process, and then the political process has secondary effects on the wealth of non-billionaires.
To pick an extreme and unlikely hypothesis, it could be that if there weren't any billionaires corrupting politics, then the economy would be run in a better way which enabled everyone to become millionaires.
Since billionaires are a subset of those, then they cannot possibly control any more than 45%, so certainly less than half.
Can't find a source showing just billionaires, at the moment, but the first source suggests that the billionaires have a net worth on the order of 9 to 10 trillion; if billionaires control 10 trillion, and about 130 trillion is 45% of the wealth, then billionaires are in control of somewhere around 4% of global wealth.
As a rough calculation in sixty seconds, this does appear to support your assertion that billionaires control a small proportion of wealth. If you team them up with all the millionaires, they're up to almost 50%, but just the billionaires on their own; not so much.
His wealth is mostly stock, right? In fact most of the billionaires have their weight in stocks. In a theoretical situation where Bezos goes to unload all of his stocks to end world hunger, who would be there to buy it? Would the stock devalue the moment he starts selling it? It's complicated.
