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

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