The New Poll Tax
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

There is a darkly comic, even Orwellian quality to the City Council’s vote yesterday to increase matching funds for municipal races and to cap private donations. The admixture of strictly controlled entrepreneurship and generous levels of public subsidy has echoes of Hungary during the years of Janos Kadar’s “goulash communism.” But that is surely no surprise: state socialism has more adherents today in Manhattan than it does in Budapest.
It is no secret that the real target of this measure is Mayor Bloomberg – who took no public finance when he won in 2001. Like all proponents of taxpayer funding, partisans of the latest increase in matching funds assert that it will act as a check against the overweening power of wealthy special interest groups ostensibly to “buy elections” and then to govern on behalf of those interests rather than for the common weal. Public money for private campaigns is a bad enough idea at the best of times, but at least some of the “clean government” types of yesteryear who saddled us with the concept in the Watergate era had altruistic motives.
No such Cincinnatian motive dignifies this bill. Here, the intended beneficiary is the inspiration behind the measure – City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, who next year seems likely to run for mayor against Mr. Bloomberg. He is seeking to erode Mr Bloomberg’s financial advantage at the ordinary taxpayer’s expense. But at least the “special interests” are just that – utility companies and other institutions or business sectors which contribute something to civic life. “Engine Charlie” Wilson, the General Motors executive who became President Eisenhower’s first secretary of defense, controversially declared that “what is good for General Motors is good for America.” The subtext of this legislation is “what’s good for Gifford Miller is good for New York.” And he has done it before, to evade the two term limit rule on his current position.
As the former parks commissioner, Henry Stern, observes to us, this is not even special interest group politics: this is personal interest politics, entailing the use of local government power to oppress ordinary citizens. If voters were not so cal loused by the spectacle of the Bruno and Valella affairs, there would be a grassroots revolt; the municipal nomenclature who voted for a further helping of pork must be relieved that, unlike in California, there is so little scope in this jurisdiction for a recall petition or a ballot proposition to restrain the political class.
Like all attempts to skewer the free market, public campaign subsidy ends up as not only expensive but counterproductive. At the federal level, the effect of Mc-Cain-Feingold has not been to diminish the role of money in politics: it has been to drive up expenditure levels to the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, funded partly by the likes of George Soros.
Nor is there any evidence that private money is the decisive factor in races: were this so, we should by now be reading history books on the administrations of President John Connally, President Ross Perot, and Mayor Ronald Lauder. Above all, no one can claim – as advocates of “reform” asserted when first introduced here – that chasing private money out of politics raises the caliber of our elected representatives. After all, and sadly, the City Council remains one of the least regarded of the city’s public bodies.
At least the populists of the past turned their empty campaign chests to their advantage. The impoverished nature of their campaigns became a qualifying point, if sometimes a demogogic one. Today, in New York City, we are witnessing the fusion of the institutions of government with the needs of a particular faction. Call it a new poll tax. It’s a raid that makes it all the more commendable that some Democrats such as Simcha Felder of Borough Park have the courage to break with the party line in opposing municipal kleptocracy at its worst.