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Money well spent?
Published on March 7, 2008
Category: Faulty Assumptions
A study released by a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Foundation reveals that - make sure you're sitting - Pew Charitable Trusts wasted a lot of money underwriting efforts to enact restrictive campaign finance laws. Supporters of campaign finance and speech regulations, supported primarily by large foundations including Pew, like to argue that money plays an unholy role in politics, skewing legislative and policy outcomes away from those that "serve the people" and towards so-called "special interests."
What a surprise then, when a Pew study grading state governments reveals that states with the least restrictive campaign finance laws are among the best governed states in the nation, while those with more restrictive laws fall toward the bottom.
Utah and Virginia, two states with some of the lease restrictive laws in the country, sit atop the list of best governed states. Texas, Iowa, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Missouri, New Mexico and Indiana - also fairly speech-friendly states also rank at or above the average. Only four of the thirteen (30 percent) most speech-friendly states rank below average.
Meanwhile, 15 of the remaining 37 states (41 percent) rank below average. Maybe its time to free some of these states from burdensome regulations.
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