Public Election Financing

As expected, Obama has declined to have the taxpayers foot the bill for his campaign. This decision has drawn an amazing amount of criticism. Hoping to understand the outrage, I have read a number of articles, but the only argument I could find was something like "changing your mind is a bad thing". Have these authors never changed their minds?

Public financing is a good idea for reducing the influence of special interests in government. Politicians get and keep their employment by winning elections. Winning elections requires money. Raising millions generally requires donations from special interest groups. As a result, politicians primarily serve special interests. Public financing tries to put a stop to this by giving the money to the candidate so that he does not have to serve special interests to pay for his campaign. Good idea in theory, but it doesn't work so well in practice. Organizations which are supposedly independent of the politicain's campaign can spend any amount they want. So the candidate is still beholden to the special interests who finance those organizations.

At the time Obama said he would use public financing, the only two choices were those above. The public financing option, with it's spending limitations, was the more principled position. But there has been a dramatic change in the electoral landscape. Obama has shown (and surprised himself) that millions of individuals making small contributions can finance a campaign themselves. This is a third way (individuals). This is a revolutionary change in ethical politics, and a dire threat to lobbying organizations whose business model relies on politicians dependence on thier money.

So here's a simple (and fairly imperfect) analogy. The weather forecasts rain on July 4, so the town picnic is planned as an indoor affair. On the day of the picnic the skies are clear. The Mayor announces the good news that there will be fireworks after all. And all the newspapers criticize him. "He said there would be no fireworks, and he lied. What happened to his promise to be a different kind of politician...".

Bank Security

The other day I went to 1stBank without my account number. They asked for my verbal password. Funny, I never set such a thing. They assured me I did and wrote it down on a slip of paper. It was my login password! They tried to convince me I had set it once and forgotten it, and that all their customers do. The problem is, it is not a word at all but a string of characters that is awkward to say. I would never say it out loud in front of other customers as it could allow anyone to use my online account to transfer funds. In fact the teller could just do that anonymously from the comfort of his home, if he realized what it was. He could do that for any number of accounts.

The other scary part of this is, online passwords are supposed to be encrypted using a one-way hash. If you forget a password, they are supposed to reset it to a random string, then you have to change it when you next log in. They are not supposed to have any way to recover a password. That way, disgruntled system administrators cannot get them. The fact that they created verbal passwords from their online passwords means they are not securing the online passwords. This is much worse than keeping credit card numbers in their database. 1stBank has $8 billion in deposits!