Op-ed column: Why are things the way they are? By David Schlosser, candidate for U.S. Congress
Week of 5th July 2006 http://www.schlosserforcongress.com/media-press/op-ed/060705_Why_things_are. php Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh, a pivotal Democratic political figure during the 1950s and 1960s and state treasurer of California from 1975 until 1987, famously remarked that "[m]oney is the mother's milk of politics." Following the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on campaign finance in Randall v. Sorrell, Americans have embarked on a session of hand-wringing over Unruh's self-evident declaration. >From campaign contribution and expenditure limits to public funding of political campaigns, well intentioned activists plot more and different laws to prevent the indignity of money in politics. Millions of dollars flowing into campaigns every year legitimizes concern about influence peddling. Stories of public corruption emerging from states as diverse as California, Louisiana, and West Virginia associate the sleaze of names like Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom with our elected representatives. If money is the source of the problem, logic would indicate that getting rid of the money would also get rid of the problem. Conventional wisdom suggests that laws to control the volume and source of campaign contributions will solve this fearsome problem. The trouble with conventional wisdom is that it is so frequently wrong. My high school debate coach, the celebrated Bill Davis, taught me early in my career as a critical thinker to ask myself, "Self, why are things they way they are?" Spending a few moments considering that simple question is frequently an excellent way to uncover the shaky foundations of conventional wisdom. In the case of campaign finance reform, two sets of compelling statistics help explain why things are the way they are: The first set of numbers details only a few examples of legislative generosity enabled by the transfer of money from American taxpayers to special interests: * Between 1996 and 2002, The U.S. Department of Agriculture paid an average of $16 billion each year to subsidize more than two dozen commodities. * In 1997, according to the Cato Institute, Fortune 500 companies received nearly $75 billion in taxpayer subsidies while earning $325 billion; by 2003, according to Public Citizen, public subsidies of profitable global corporations grew to almost $125 billion. * The U.S. Forest Service has a 382,000-mile network of taxpayer-financed roads that primarily serve the timber industry and currently boast a $10 billion road maintenance backlog. The second set of numbers details contributions made to political candidates: * According to Public Citizen, lobbyists and their political action committees contributed at least $103.1 million to members of Congress between 1998 and 2006. * According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Arizona candidates for U.S. Congress and Senate collected more than $18.7 million for the 2006 election cycle, about $14 million for the 2004 elections, and more than $7.5 million for the 2002 elections (there were no U.S. Senate races in Arizona that year) - more than $40 million since the turn of the century. * During the same interval, incumbent Arizona Congressman Rick Renzi raised approximately $4.8 million and spent nearly $4 million. There is a third statistic worth considering for shock value: the 32,000 lobbyists in Washington, DC actually outnumber the 30,000 members and staff of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Asking why things are they way they are in the context of those statistics suggests that political contributions are a pretty good investment. Back-of-the-envelope calculations applying the $40 million donated to Arizona's ten federal legislators to all of America's legislators suggest that individuals and businesses contributed about $2 billion to our elected representatives since the November 2000 elections. If those representatives can award tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in tax favors and subsidies, the return on investment for a political contribution is extraordinarily high. If contributing less than $500 million a year yields a government payout north of $100 billion a year, a cynic might suggest the problem is not too much money in politics, but that our rulers are selling out too cheaply. Cynicism aside, what becomes clear from these statistics is that the role of money in politics has to do with the power of politicians to reward their contributors with vast sums of your tax dollars. If you want to get rid of money in politics, take away that power. As long as it exists, the temptation to buy that power is far too great for campaign finance rules to overcome. In an environment with jackpot payouts enabled by federal law and taxpayer dollars, campaign finance law becomes nothing more than an inconvenience easily skirted by accountants, lawyers, and the vast money laundering apparatus of think tanks, political action committees, 527 groups, and lobbyists that all have the same financial backers - corporations and extraordinarily wealthy individuals - and the same goals - using the power of government to reward friends and punish enemies. And never forget that the people reforming the campaign finance laws are the people who have a vested interest in making those laws porous enough that they can keep collecting money to fund their campaigns. This isn't rocket surgery. This is basic math. This is high-school economics. If it were as advanced as trigonometry, perhaps there would be an excuse for not getting it other than the distractions created by the same legislators who benefit from the system when they're in office and become part of the system when they leave office. Today, campaign finance laws and "reform" merely treat the symptoms of a corrupt system. Getting the money out of politics requires that we stop treating the symptoms. We must treat the system. We must eliminate the power of individuals and corporations to manipulate government in ways that enrich them and impoverish their competitors. And the only way to do that is to prevent politicians from choosing winners and losers by returning to the Constitutional roots of limited government and enumerated powers - following our nation's founders' clear direction that the Federal government should have no powers that the Constitution does not explicitly grant. # # # Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress David Schlosser, 38, lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., where he is a public relations manager for a global microprocessor company and has been a part-time instructor in the School of Communications at Northern Arizona University. He brings nearly a decade of political experience to his campaign for Congress, and is a graduate of Trinity University and the University of Texas. His wife, Anne, is a corporate training and development professional. For more information about Schlosser and his campaign for Arizona's First Congressional District, visit www.SchlosserForCongress.com <http://www.schlosserforcongress.com/> . 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