• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Grant and Franklin Project

Assume with me that every voter in America produces at least fifty dollars in revenue to the U.S. Treasury. Ninety percent of Americans pay some tax revenue to the federal government.5 And we can assume the percentage of voters who pay some tax revenue is even higher.

Given this assumption, consider the outline of a system to finance political campaigns that would not produce the cynicism that stains the current system:

First, we convert the first fifty dollars that each of us contributes to the federal Treasury into a voucher. Call it a “democracy voucher.” Each voter is free to allocate his or her democracy voucher as he or she wishes. Maybe fifty dollars to a single candidate. Maybe twenty-five dollars each to two candidates. Maybe ten dollars each to five candidates.6 The only requirement is that the candidate receiving the voucher must opt into the system.

Second, if the democracy voucher is not allocated, then it goes to the political party to which the voter is registered. If the voter is not registered to a party, then it goes to supplement funding for the infrastructure of democracy: voting systems, voter education, and the Grant and Franklin Project.

Third, voters are free under this system to supplement the voucher contribution with their own contribution—up to $100 per candidate. One hundred dollars is nothing… to about 2 percent of the American public. It is a great deal of money to everyone else.

Fourth, and finally, any viable candidate for Congress could receive these contributions if he or she agreed to one important condition: that the only money that candidate accepted to fund his or her campaign would be democracy vouchers and contributions from individuals of up to $100 per citizen. That means no PAC money and no direct contributions from political parties. The only external funds such a campaign would receive would be democracy vouchers plus, at most, one Ben Franklin per citizen.

There are a bunch of ways to tinker with the elements to this design. We could (and, in my view, should) increase the voucher amount and add the presidency. I’ve excluded that office for now, but no reform would be complete without it. We could also add the ability of political parties to contribute. I’d be for that—political parties are critically important stabilizing and energizing tools for democracy—but I’ve left them out for the moment (partly because they add an important complication: How would you create a voluntary limit to the amount each individual gave to a political party and avoid that being channeled improperly to the candidates?). Likewise, we could limit the voucher contributions to candidates within your own district. (Wisconsin did this at the end of the nineteenth century.)7 That, too, may make more sense of the project to reinforce constituent dependencies. But this, too, I’ve left out for the moment, again for the purposes of keeping the idea simple and clear.

This design has a number of essential features:

First, it is voluntary. Candidates opt into the system, just as presidential candidates have (or have not) opted into the existing system to fund presidential campaigns. By making it voluntary, we avoid an almost certain invalidation by the Supreme Court on the basis of Buckley. Contribution limits, the Court said, are fine, so long as the limit is related to a reasonable perception of quid pro quo corruption.8 But $100 would be too low a limit for this Court.

Second, unlike practically every other plan to fund political campaigns publicly, this plan does not allow “your money” to be used to support speech you don’t believe in. The money that gets allocated here is money tied to you. It’s the “first fifty dollars” you send to the federal Treasury. Whether through income tax, or gas tax, or cigarette tax—it doesn’t matter. You caused the money to enter the federal system. You get to allocate it to whomever you wish. Others will allocate their money