Why Taxes Are High and Jobs Are Hard to Find?
Why do Taxes and Borrowing Keep Rising Under
Both Republicans and Democrats?
Because New Jersey has made it
effectively illegal to run a low budget campaign for Governor. Last year, McCain
and Obama spent $1.1 billion on their campaigns for
president. That is over $8 per
vote. In the June 2nd
primary, every Christie vote cost taxpayers $17.11 per vote and every Lonegan vote cost $14.25 in campaign matching funds.
In 1977, in the wake of the Watergate
scandal, New Jersey started publicly financing Governors’ races. The stated reason according to Lewis B.
Thurston, III, chairman of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, was to
“limit the undue influence of large contributors.” New Jersey matches every dollar raised by a gubernatorial
candidate with two more from the state treasury. However, gubernatorial candidates receive
nothing unless they first raise $340,000 by September 1st.
Seeing as most voters pay no attention to
politics until well after Labor Day, this means that only Republicans and
Democrats, with their permanent publicly subsidized party organizations, can
raise the funds necessary to qualify for public funding. In the 32 years that taxpayers
funds have been used to pay for Governor campaigns, only one independent,
Libertarian Murray Sabrin, has managed to raise the
funds necessary to receive public matching funds. He accomplished this by raising money from
Libertarian Party members nationwide.
The Debates
In exchange for
the public matching funds, candidates must agree to participate in government
sanctioned debates. The only problem is
that the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission has turned public
funding into a requirement for expensive campaigns by prohibiting candidates
that fail to qualify for public funding from appearing in those debates.
So, instead of
using public funds to level the playing field and make elections fairer, New
Jersey uses public funding only to subsidize candidates that already have
access to private money. Public funding
is really a subsidy to those who already give to political candidates. Your taxes do not necessarily to go
candidates you support, but only to candidates who already can gain access to
private donations.
Then candidates without the millions
in private donations are not included in the government required debates. This
is using public funding to make elections more unfair, not less.
Candidates with ideas for saving
money, who might run a low budget campaign, are silenced by being kept out of
the debates, newpaper articles and off
television. That is why taxes, borrowing
and spending go up regardless of whether the Republicans or Democrats win the
Governor’s mansion. Poor candidates with
economical ideas are kept out of the race through government misuse of the
campaign finance law.
Once elected, the Governor needs to
pursue policies that make money for their campaign contributors, because he or
she knows he or she will be asking for contributions for re-election or other
party purposes. That is why Governor Corzine invested $650 million of the state pension money
with hedge funds of his old buddies on Wall Street. That is why Christopher Christie gave his
former boss, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft’s law firm, a
multimillion dollar a month oversight contract to monitor misbehaving
corporations. Now, lawyers from that
firm contribute to Christie’s campaign.
Hedge fund investing and the
oversight agreement cost you money, right along with the matching funds that
keep the campaign closed to independents.
So, you pay for the campaigns, but the benefits flow to Wall Street and
big law firms. It’s like triple
taxation. No wonder you are broke.
Why Jobs Are Hard
To Find – Innovation Has Become Illegal
Governments elected by
subverting the intent of the Election Law subvert the intent of all the other
laws. Government is run for the benefit
of the lawyers and private campaign contributors, not the taxpayers and voters.
Nowhere is this more true than in the misuse of trademark and copyright
laws. The purpose of the copyright law
is to get new and useful inventions into the hands of the public. In order to do this in a nation of freedom of
speech and press, Congress determined that authors and inventors should have
the exclusive rights to their works FOR A LIMITED TIME. This law has now been turned upside down to
vest a permanent property interest in creative works.
In the old days, progress came
from one person making improvements to another person’s product. Building a better
mousetrap. Now, it is illegal to
modify someone else’s design without their consent.
All communication is theme and
variation. Under current copyright laws,
none of the great composers: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler or Prokofiev, would
have been able to write music. Witness
the absurdity of the courts fining a mother of four $1.9 million for the
“illegal” copying and distribution of 24 songs.
The record companies want it
both ways. They want to sell a product,
but retain ownership. Thanks to the tens
of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, the Republicans and Democrats
obligingly turned the law intended to get new ideas and products into the
public domain into one that prevents it.
And that is why there are fewer
and fewer jobs. Because the trillions of
dollars that should have been used as venture capital to create the new
products and ideas for the economy of the future that would have been on hand
to replace the current one when it reaches the end of its shelf life, that
money was used to create new financial products to enrich the financiers and
lawyers who created them, and boost the value of existing assets like housing
and stocks of current companies. The
United States is a capitalist country that has not had any venture capital for
thirty years.
And now, to add insult to
injury, the government is borrowing trillions of dollars,
that must be repaid by you or your children or grandchildren, not to
invest in the future, but to prop up the financial and industrial enterprises
of the past that created this mess in the first place. Welfare “as we knew it” is no longer for poor
people, it is for the billionaires, the banks, and the
automobile companies.
What
you can do
I’m Joshua Leinsdorf,
an independent candidate for Governor of New Jersey, running under the “Fair
Election Party” slogan. I spent nine
years on the Princeton Regional School Board.
I have a long record of accomplishment raising standards in education
and a viable program for cutting school busing costs and providing every high
school student with a laptop computer. I
have a proven record of creating bike paths, sidewalks and improving public
transportation. I favor entirely
abolishing county government, the source of most of the corruption,
incompetence and waste in government, consolidating local governments, and
prohibiting gerrymandering.
I have a
complete program that you can find on my website: http://www.leinsdorf.com or call me at
(609) 658-8919. Of course, I could use a
financial contribution, but more important is that you tell everyone you know
who is registered to vote in New Jersey that there is an independent candidate
for Governor, Joshua Leinsdorf, who needs help to get his message out. A free market economy can not function
without a free market in ideas. The fundamental problem is that the pundits and
professors cover political campaigns as if they were sporting events. They tell the voters that all that counts is
who wins and who loses. But regardless
of who wins, nothing changes. In fact,
from a government policy point of view, the most important thing is how the
game is played. Unless candidates take
positions on issues, voters have no opportunity to influence government
policy. Forcibly excluding certain
candidates and viewpoints from the debate is catastrophic, especially in an
economic crisis.
Thank you for
taking the time to read these 1,300 words.
Joshua Leinsdorf