To the average voter, it sounds so innocent.
Levy on tax on lobbyists to finance a “pilot project” that would pay the campaign expenses of candidates in the next two elections for Secretary of State.
But like many ballot initiatives that promise one thing and deliver something quite different, Prop 15 is not what its backers say it is.
Prop 15 doesn’t stop with two elections. It would repeal the ban on tax-supported campaigns statewide. With a simple majority vote, legislators could finance their own campaigns with taxpayer dollars. The same is true for city councils and boards of supervisors.
And it doesn’t stop with the lobbyist tax. Prop 15 invites legislators to use the General Fund or “other sources” to pay for campaign expenses. Those “other sources” include new taxes and fees – not to pay the salaries of police officers and teachers, but to pay for negative ads and junk mail.
Four years ago, 74 percent of voters said NO to Prop 89, a plan to tax businesses to finance political campaigns. In 2000, two-thirds of voters rejected another public campaign financing scheme, Proposition 25.
Here we go again. Sacramento’s big spenders will ask voters to pass Prop 15 – the third attempt in ten years to repeal the ban on public campaign financing voters enacted over 20 years ago.
They won’t phrase it that way in their campaign materials. In fact, the Legislature, which put Prop 15 on the ballot and wrote the ballot label, neglected to mention that the ban on taxpayer-financed campaigns would be repealed. A judge added that critical fact to the ballot label.
The lobbyist tax proposed in Prop 15 will probably be stricken by the courts — as similar taxes were in Arizona, Vermont and Oregon — leaving the state with an expensive new public campaign finance system and no tax revenue to pay for it.
Anybody who cares about vital state services should be vigorously opposing this initiative. Prop 15 would put legislators in the position of choosing between paying for their own campaigns or other state programs, like education, public safety and transportation.
Prop 15 claims to reduce the influence of special interests in politics, but Prop 15 explicitly allows politicians to continue to take money from special interests at the same time taxpayers finance their campaign expenses. If Prop 15 backers really wanted to reduce the influence of special interests, they wouldn’t have added that section.
If they wanted to protect the General Fund from being used for campaigns, they wouldn’t have added that provision either.
And if they wanted to limit Prop 15 to a pilot program, they could have written Prop 15 that way.
They did exactly the opposite.
There are better uses of our tax dollars than relieving politicians of the burden to raise money to finance their own political ambitions. Vote NO on Prop 15.