Mayor Bloomberg, not content with the hefty increase in the city’s property tax, is now threatening to raise income taxes in what is already a high-tax city. His rationale, and that of the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, is that the city’s $6 billion budget gap can’t be closed by spending cuts. Well, one of the places the politicians might look for some spending cuts is pretty close to home: The New York City Campaign Finance Board. What the Campaign Finance Board does is give out taxpayer money to politicians to spend on their political campaigns. This spending adds up. For the 2001 elections, the city’s taxpayers, through the Campaign Finance Board, gave out $41,751,609 to help politicians buy campaign commercials, print bumper stickers and hire consultants.

In the old days, candidates raised money from actual voters through contributions that were actually voluntary. That’s hard work. But in the late 1980s, the City Council got the inspired idea of forcing voters (and non-voters) to fund their re-election campaigns from the public purse. Under the system that emerged, New York has not one but two overlapping campaign finance bureaucracies, each with its own offices and ad ministrative structures. In addition to the Campaign Finance Board, there is the Board of Elections; most candidates have to fill out forms from both. There’s still some private fundraising that goes on. But the city matches each privately raised dollar with four dollars kicked in by the city’s taxpayers.

The idea of matching funds is nothing new. Candidates for president of America get matching funds from a pool that is created by a checkoff on income tax returns. At least it’s optional. New Yorkers have no such luck. They’re stuck subsidizing the re-election campaigns of the politicians whether they like it or not. The money comes not from a voluntary checkoff pool but from the city’s general operating budget. Los Angeles has a matching program, but it works on a one-to-one basis, not a four-to-one basis. New York’s four-to-one matching program is the most generous in the country, experts say.

Theorists of campaign finance “reform” like public funding of campaigns because it frees politicians from having to cater to powerful donors, or “special interests.” But those special interests also happen to be known as taxpayers. In other words, one effect of public funding of campaigns in New York has been to make the politicians less accountable to the taxpayers. The real estate industry, for instance, has long been active in making donations to New York politicians. And the real estate industry will be hard-hit by the property tax increase. If the politicians didn’t have a giant $40 million cushion of taxpayer re-election funds to fall back on, they might have been a little bit slower to bite the hand that feeds them. Mr. Bloomberg, who funded his campaign from his own wealth and did not accept public money, has his own supposed independence from the “special interests” — i.e., the taxpayers — which can be both a blessing and a curse.

Critics of the old system claim politicians would use taxpayer money to dispense favors — tax breaks, city programs, contracts — to campaign contributors, who kicked a portion of the profits back to the politicians in campaign contributions. Under that system, at least the campaign contributors saw a logic to their participation. Under the new system, the politicians take taxpayer money and funnel it directly into their own re-election campaigns. There’s not much of a role left for the public, other than paying the increased taxes that the politicians are demanding because they can’t figure out how to balance the budget by cutting. Which puts the irony in sharp relief. With New York facing a $6 billion gap next year, is it really necessary to ask taxpayers to dig deeper to fund the nation’s most generous welfare program for politicians? Cutting the program back to a one-to-one match would save the city $30 million. Call it welfare reform for politicians.