Ask 1000 random Californians of all political stripes to list what they believe should be the state’s spending priorities, and you’ll probably see education, public safety and transportation at the top of almost every list. After that, priorities will vary depending on the individual’s point of view.
What you won’t see on anyone’s list is taxpayer financing of political campaigns, yet that’s just what Prop 15 on the June ballot would do. With a mammoth budget deficit, taxes going up, a crumbling infrastructure, and a host of assorted problems facing California, it’s not surprising that voters can think of plenty of things to spend their money on besides junk mail and negative TV ads.
Four years ago, 74 percent of voters said NO to Prop 89, a plan to tax businesses to finance political campaigns. In 2000, when the state was flush with tax revenue from the dot-com boom, two-thirds of voters rejected another public campaign financing scheme, Proposition 25.
Here we go again with Proposition 15. The California Nurses Association and other members of the spending lobby will ask voters for the third time in ten years to repeal the same ban on public campaign financing voters themselves enacted over 20 years ago.
Of course, they won’t phrase it quite that way in their ballot arguments and campaign materials. In fact, the Legislature, which put Prop 15 on the ballot and wrote the ballot label into the law, completely neglected to mention that the ban on public financing would be repealed. A Superior Court judge had to intervene to insert that critical fact into the ballot label.
The liberal nurses’ association union that is the chief sponsor of Prop 15 would rather have you believe that it is a benign pilot program that would charge lobbyists a fee and use the revenue to finance the campaigns of qualified candidates for Secretary of State.
The real purpose of Prop 15 is much more insidious. The repeal of the ban on taxpayer-funded campaigns means that legislators, with a simple majority vote, can expand public campaign financing to any campaigns they want, including their own. And if the lobbyist tax is declared unconstitutional, as courts in Arizona and Vermont have already ruled, the Legislature can use the “General Fund or other sources as determined by the Legislature” to pay for campaigns. Given the current composition of the Legislature, it’s certainly not a stretch to imagine a system in a few years where every campaign up to and including governor is paid for by our tax dollars. Indeed, if Jerry Brown becomes governor, you can count on it.
And if taxpayer funded campaigns is a good idea for state elections, why not local elections? Prop 15 would allow that as well.
I urge you to vote no on Proposition 15. You can be sure that’s how I will be voting.
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