step 1: Direct my government subsided $50 to my own presidential campaign.

step 2: Hire myself as a campaign strategy manager for the tune of $50.

step 3: Profit

Let's do it.

This was a very clear and interesting article about a topic that doesn’t get enough fresh air. More please.

I remember when Salon focused on the important issues: sex, movies, paris & britney and reality television. Nowadays its all campaign finance reform, the war in iraq and trials of former high ranking members of the bush administration.

Oh, Salon, how did you lose your way?

I can only assume that this is the fault of Joan Walsh.

This may sound like a good idea if it actually worked as intended-- up to a point. the fifty bucks to be directed by the voters sounds like a good idea, as does substantially increased limits on private donations, but keeping the big money secret is an invitation for creative corruption.

I'm not going to give ANYBODY a hundred grand, or even ten grand, if I can't hope to influence them, or with no means to communicate that I did so. If the big money private donations were made private, people with big money would still find a way to make known their financial directives to the politicos, but it would be outside the public eye, laundered in various ways. This is better?

And ordinary people would no longer at least know who owns their politicians-- and they'd still be owned by others.

Suppose Corrupt Politician calls Big Donor and asks for a major contribution. Big Donor says, sure, I'll give you the $100,000 maximum. Even assuming that $100,000 donations come in so often that it wouldn't be obvious whose contribution was delayed five days by the FEC, all that Corrupt Politician would to do to evade the spirit of the law is say, Well, so that I can be sure that you send the money, don't send me $100,000 even. Instead, send exactly $99,781.53. Assign a different trivial amount to each big donor, keep a nice spreadsheet handy, and the only people kept in the dark are the public.

Goodness, my dear, had nothing to do with it. Just make the $3 checkoff mandatory and publicly finance elections, no matter what the public wants or think they want. Educate the public why that is a good thing. And start educating them on the need for so-called instant runoff voting. And get rid of the archaic Electoral College. Will there be any serious discussion by the mainstream media of all this? Of course not, because they can't get past the day to day of who's winning and losing politically. It's all like a game of sports to them.

I think secret donations might help if the blinding mechanism prevents candidates from learning the dollar ammount of the donations. Otherwise, MBNA Bank could just rewrite the bankruptcy law again, for a "secret" donation of $97,683.71.

Regardless, TV ads are the biggest campaign expense and taxpayers shouldn't have to buy them. Instead, broadcasters should be required to give free airtime to every candidate on the ballot. Starting 30 days before the election, each House candidate should get two hours of free ads, to be used as the candidates see fit. For Senate candidates, four hours and for President, eight.

If one candidate buys additional airtime, the broadcaster should be required to match it with free airtime to every other candidate. This would make it impossible to buy advantage, while preseving the First Amendment.

This should be an unfunded mandate. Broadcasters should be compensated only with their FCC license, which is a government-enforced monopoly privilege to broadcast on the assigned frequency.

The price of elections would come down to levels that small donors could sustain and the improvement to American democracy would be enormous. Meanwhile, the price of underarm deodorant and car commercials would go up slightly and this would be an improvement too!

Donors would require some sort of receipt from the FEC to demonstrate where their money has gone, or else the FEC itself would be open to charges of fraud in their allocation of money. Then all you’d have to do is show your candidate the receipt and voila, influence obtained (and without the inconvenience of public disclosure).

Even if it did work, all it means is that candidates would have to become more ideologically pure so that donors could be more certain that their money will bring about the changes they desire. Incrementally beneficial or narrowly targeted legislation would be too subtle. To attract money, candidates would have to pander even harder than they are doing now. This doesn't mean responsive to constituents - it means slavishly obedient to phantom masters.

Every time an effort is made to reform campaign financing, the system gets worse – campaigns get uglier, incumbents and the two big parties reap most of the advantages. Leave bad enough alone.

The problem with campaigns isn't money, it's time. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars because they have to fill 2 years of advertising. If campaigns were legally restricted to 60 days or so then that would automatically place a limit on the amount of money they can spend. Other countries do this, it's not unheard of.

I read that in the last British election the cost of the national campaign of ALL parties combined was less than the cost of a single senate race in the US.

Election campaignes are no longer about informing the public about the issues involved and what the candidates stand for. It is more like the Coke and Pepsi war and the hundreds of millions spent on advertising there.

SR and Jalmari are right. Too-long campaigns devour massive amounts of cash, which is spent primarily on television advertising.

But at bottom this idea falters on the "establish tighter rules" fallacy. We've been adding and tightening campaign finance rules for 30 years and each "improvement" just makes things worse.

Meanwhile, two states (Vermont and Arizona, I think) have already established "Clean Campaign" laws based on an idea Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower have been touting for more than a decade.

Oversimplified, it offers public financing to both incumbents and challengers. You can turn it down and raise money privately, but if you do, your opponent gets the same amount in public money that you raise in private (incumbents get 80% of what challengers raise, to compensate for the incumbency factor.)

It levels the playing field and vastly reduces the incentive to raise oceans of cash privately (why spend time and money raising money if you opponent gets the same amount with no effort at all?)

And it works! It's been proven in at least two campaign cycles. Only with state candidates so far, but if it works for them, why not nationally?

A shortened campaign season and making political advertising subject to a new Fairness Doctrine would vastly increase the effectiveness of Clean Campaign rules.

The bribers, bribe-takers, rule-breakers and other criminals will always be with us. That is no reason not to try a system that at least limits their ability to operate.

Giving up on campaign finance reform is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.