Occupy Campaign Finance Reform

Imagine a political systems that allows anyone to run for election who can generate sufficient signatures to get on a ballot who are then each given the same amount of public money to spend on their election. Imagine being elected and not then spending 50% of your time fundraising. Imagine not  dialing for dollars, imagine no fundraisers, imagine no moneyed special interests, imagine no moneyed lobbying. Imagine not contributing to political parties or to political campaigns. Imagine if  the amount of money it takes to get elected was not obscene and corrosive.  Just a thought.

Here is an article that suggests that while there is some correlation and elasticity between charitable giving and political donations there is a zero sum point at which one negatively impacts the other. In other words,  at some point,  the millions given to political campaigns may come from the (picked) pockets of the needy.  Or, put another way:

BEAST VERY BAD, IT EAT EVERYTHING - NOT MAKE SENSE TO FEED BEAST MORE.  POLICY, DEVELOPMENT, INVESTMENT IN DOING GOOD MAKE SENSE.  ME VOTE FOR THAT GUY BUT ME NOT FEED BEAST.

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"It's hard to pass the plate for super PAC money while Democratic leaders have been preaching about the sins of it. But the reality is, it is essential in 2012."

ROBERT ZIMMERMAN, a New York-based fund-raiser for President Obama.

ME THINK ZIMMERMAN WRONG. HIM WOULD GET MORE VOTES BY SAYING "WE NOT HAVE SUPER PAC'.  HIM CAN SAY THIS VERY LOUD - USE PEOPLE MEGAPHONE - BEAST NOT LIKE THAT. BEAST NOT LIKE CHANGE.

Do charitable subsidies crowd out political giving? The missing link between charitable and political contributions.

by Barış K. Yörük*

Abstract

This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on political giving using five independent surveys of charitable and political giving in the United States conducted from 1990 to 2001. The results show that charitable and political giving are complements. Compared with non-donors, charitable donors are more likely to donate and give more to political organizations. Increasing the price of charitable giving decreases not only charitable giving but also the probability of giving and the amount of donations to political organizations. The implied elasticity of the amount of political contributions with respect to the tax price of charitable giving is as much as -0.88. This effect is robust under different specifications and with different sets of instrumental variables. These results highlight the positive externalities created by charitable subsidies and have important implications for economic models of political and charitable giving.

Keywords: charitable giving, political giving, tax price of giving JEL classification: H24, H31, L38

* Department of Economics, University at Albany, SUNY, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12222. Tel: (518) 442-3175. Fax: (518) 442-4736. E-mail: byoruk@albany.edu.