Wrong Fix For Albany: Why 'Public Financing' Fails
Recent Justice Department data show that, on a per-capita basis between 1976 and 2008, New York had the 10th-most federal public-corruption convictions and the 12th-most relative to the number of government employees.
According to a July tally by the good-government group Citizens Union, “ethical or criminal issues” have forced 26 New York legislators out of office since 1999.
Across the state, lawmakers from both parties have been swept up in scandals involving everything from bribery to domestic violence to looting government-backed nonprofits to marriage fraud.
Much of the establishment has united behind a magic cure for the corruption plague: copying New York City's campaign-finance system at the state level. Gov. Cuomo pushed a version of this Wednesday.
Public financing, we're told, will limit corruption by increasing the amount of “clean” money in politics, and help democracy by encouraging greater participation in the political process and sparking more competitive races because better candidates will want to run.
All untrue — or, at best, unproven. Under the city's public-financing program, public corruption remains endemic, while voter-turnout levels have dropped to record lows and incumbents remain nearly unbeatable.
Extending this statewide would waste money, overregulate the electoral process and create new potential for abuse.
No evidence supports advocates' claims that public financing strengthens democracy. Even if the offer of a taxpayer match encourages more people to give money to campaigns, as some studies have suggested, donor participation remains low compared with the total voting population.
More people voted for Rudolph Giuliani's losing bid for mayor in 1989, the first election with matching funds, than for Bill de Blasio's winning one in 2013, even as the city's population grew by more than 1 million (and even as the matching-funds rate rose sharply).
Further, studies of contributions to national campaigns show that small donors tend to be as extreme in their views as large donors, and perhaps more so — a sobering fact for those who worry political polarization is harming democracy.
Public financing has done nothing to spur competition in New York City elections, notwithstanding claims from some former candidates that the availability of matching funds influenced their decision to run or helped them prevail.
As Citizens Union found — in a report arguing for public financing — incumbent City Council members get re-elected at a rate close to 95 percent.
Even more discouragingly for campaign-finance proponents, it has done little or nothing to curb corruption in city government. Many participants in the matching-funds program have been implicated in one scandal or another.
Advocates stress that, when combined with other measures, such as lower contribution limits, public financing could thwart so-called legal corruption — by which they mean the power of political money, especially that donated by wealthy business interests, to purchase access to policymakers.
It's striking, though, how little influence business interests seem to wield in New York. In most state rankings of business-friendly environments, New York ranks near the bottom.
In every year but one since 1977, the Tax Foundation has deemed New York's tax regime the nation's most burdensome.
“Legal corruption” appears to be a bad deal for the purported corrupters. Why the need for public financing, then?
Rather than copying the city's ineffective system, Albany should pursue more modest measures to fight corruption, such as focusing on legislators' personal use of campaign funds and addressing the disclosure problems associated with the so-called LLC loophole, via which corporations circumvent contribution limits by donating through obscure subsidiaries.
Both critics and advocates of campaign-finance reform should be able to agree on stronger disclosure — the best way to fight influence-peddling through campaign donations.
Cuomo's Moreland Commission urged greater transparency for discretionary grants to nonprofits, or “member items” — a longstanding source of corruption at both the state and local levels.
Ultimately, though, Albany needs a change of culture. “The quality of people in politics was a hell of a lot higher years ago,” says former Lt.-Gov. Richard Ravitch. “The problem is that no good people want to run for office.”
Ravitch is right. Government policy alone can't solve the problem of public corruption.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post
This piece originally appeared in New York Post