Presidential candidates are free to be raising money now so as to qualify for primary season matching funds. However, the FEC won’t release any such funds until January 4, 2016. It seems likely that in January, two presidential candidates will start receiving the funds. Martin O’Malley has already raised total contributions of $3,234,569, according to his September 30, 2015 campaign finance report, so it seems inevitable he has raised at least $5,000 in each of 20 states, in small amounts (only $250 per donor counts).
Jill Stein also expects to qualify by January 4, 2016. Her campaign has updated the chart on her webpage that shows her progress. See it here.
Of course, many other Republican presidential candidates, as well as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have also received enough donations to qualify, but they don’t want to accept primary season matching funds, partly because the money comes with strings, relating to how much can be spent in any particular state. Larry Lessig had received enough donations to qualify, but he has withdrawn from the Democratic race.
S-corps (small business corporations) maybe, but no large donations from big corporations like the D/Roids gets.
Dr. Stein must have misspoken, or possibly I misunderstood her response.
Did Johnson take any corporate funds during his campaign? It’s certainly possible that he did.
As a candidate (as with all candidates) Stein’s ‘job’ was to craft seemingly responsive answers which, for a moment, shut up reporters. In this incident (described by Jill Pyeatt), it shows that Stein succeeded.for long enough.
My position is that if a society believes it is okay to tax corporations, then a mechanism must exist to allow them to speak, pollitically, in part to defend themselves from that taxation. People who object to the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC are saying the opposite: Government should be able to tax corporations, yet muzzle them and not allow them to speak, politically.
There is also the phenomenon of ‘double taxation’: Corporate profits are taxed, in America, and then when they are paid to stockholders, they are taxed, AGAIN. While as a libertarian I think all taxation is wrong, being theft, it is especially wrong to double-tax in this way. They should eliminate one of these two levels of taxation, at least.
@Jill Pyeatt: I don’t know what Jill Stein might have meant by that. In fact, during the 2012 campaign, she did qualify for matching funds just like she is trying to do now, and Jill Stein for President collected $372,000 from the FEC that year.
I’m a little confused about this. When I met Jill Stein in May of 2014, she was talking to a small group around her, and proudly said that the Greens were the only party who “had not taken corporate money”. I asked her when the LP did, and she referred to Johnson taking public funds from the Presidential campaign. I remember at the time wondering how she was referring to public campaign dollars as “corporate”, but since Gary HAD taken the money, I didn’t respond. So now she’s willing to take money?
This whole system is already a failed anachronism on the verge of being repealed. Once the “serious” candidates started ignoring it and refusing to use it (because the strings attached outweighed the benefit), then it at best became a brief minor windfall for lesser-known and third-party candidates until the big-two finally get around to repealing it. They’ve already repealed the convention funding part of the program, because the Ds and Rs preferred that the donation cap be raised for earmarked convention funding instead.
As for it being coercive, or stolen: yes, it’s coercive, because you don’t have the option of not paying the $3, only whether it goes into this program or whatever else (probably worse) thing the government was going to waste it on. But I think there’s nothing per se wrong with candidates (including Libertarian candidates) accepting it, any more than cashing your Social Security check or driving on taxpayer-funded roads. “Libertarians can’t accept or use any government-funded services” is a misleading caricature of libertarianism hurled at us by our opponents, not something libertarianism actually demands. While some may make a show of rejection as a symbolic protest or to make a statement, it isn’t a consistent rule that *anybody* can live by all the time, in a world where the state’s crowding-out effects and monopolizations are literally unavoidable.
Well, one can argue that it isn’t thievery because individuals can check a box on their taxes whether to donate to the fund or not. Of course, they wouldn’t be paying the money at all if it were not for the thievery of having to pay taxes.
If they took the money then yes. Many have not filed for matching funds just for that reason.
Are the Libertarian Party candidates who received matching funds in the past also thieves? I cannot believe you would call people thieves for taking federal matching funds while the real thieves are those corporate-backed single party (albeit with 2 factions) who have stolen the integrity of the election process from the American people.
Thieves.