New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli spent decades advocating for a tax financed campaign finance law, even going so far as suggesting that the legislature use the State Comptroller race as a test case for the system. But now that the legislature enacted a “public financing” system with the Comptroller’s race as a test case, DiNapoli is reneging on his offer.
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A bit of background: “public financing” is what advocates like to call tax financed campaigns. Taxpayer’s don’t like sending their hard earned money to pay for political campaigns. Although “public financing” is is often touted as a solution to problems regarding undue influence, corruption, and lack of diversity in legislatures, in actuality, research shows that the claims don’t pan out in the real world.
The New York State program, enacted late last month, gives six dollars from state coffers to politicians for every one dollar the politicians raise as long as the contribution is up to $175. In order to qualify, candidates must first raise $200,000 in small donations and candidates may not accept donations over $6,000.
If DiNapoli were to adhere to his promise to participate in the pilot program, he would have to return roughly $1,470,000 of his $2,100,000 war chest for the next campaign. Because of this, DiNapoli is claiming that the new system is deeply flawed, and that legislators took something “well-intentioned and hijacked it for their own short-term purposes, very much at my expense.”
It’s funny how self-interested campaign-finance schemes fall apart when they aren’t in the incumbent’s best interests. It is almost as though instead of being used to prevent corruption, New York legislators are once again proving that absurd limits and out of control programs are designed to favorably impact those who enacted the limits and programs in the first place.
It would be even more amusing if New York didn’t have serious corruption and budgetary problems, but instead of seriously addressing either issue, Governor Cuomo and his cronies decided to use the opportunity to strike against a political opponent.
However, there is a silver lining in that the program is so illogically constructed that it appears designed to fail. If, as a test case, the current program once again exposes the folly of “public financing,” New York will hopefully abandon the notion of political welfare once and for all.
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