"I know I'm not going to win," said Kaplan, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor in New Jersey.
Like other third parties, Libertarians have never won much of anything in American politics. But as they have since the party was founded in the 1970s, their candidates keep pressing on with a message of limited government, lower taxation and limited regulation.
The Libertarian candidates in Tuesday's gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia represent the two sides of third-party politics in America. On one hand, they are principled, committed and willing to forge ahead despite virtually no chance of success — issue candidates who will be happy to win a few supporters to their cause in the hope of greater victories to come.
On the other hand, in a nation growing more dissatisfied with the two traditional political parties, with Democratic promises that never seem to be delivered and Republican ideals that seem rooted in the 20th century, they represent a new way forward.
Kaplan and Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate in Virginia's gubernatorial race, are not going to win on Tuesday. Both say they are running because the two major parties are a false choice for voters.
"Virginia really needs another option," Sarvis told Watchdog.org in an interview this spring, before he officially was a candidate on the ballot. "I think the other two candidates really epitomize exactly what's wrong with their respective parties, and really shouldn't be trusted with the reins of government."
It's in this kind of race — and this kind of political climate — that Sarvis has garnered up to 13 percentage points in the public-opinion polls. And that's nothing to sneeze at for a third-party candidate who has never held public office and has raised barely $200,000 mostly from individual Virginians' donations — roughly one-one hundredth of what his opponents have raised from major outside players.
The two gubernatorial elections this week are outliers on the American political calendar, but they can be important harbingers — for both good and ill — in advance of next year's critical mid-term elections, when voters will choose governors in more than 30 states, along with congressional members and state legislators.
In Virginia, polls have shown repeatedly that voters aren't satisfied with their major party choices — ultra-conservative Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, and wheeling-and-dealing Democrat, Terry McAuliffe.
And that dissatisfaction with them and both political parties is exactly why Sarvis said he decided to make a run for it.
"I basically looked at what the race was going to be like, and when it became clear that it was going to be Terry McAuliffe against Ken Cuccinelli, I decided, why not run," Sarvis said.
The story in New Jersey is different, but with similar themes.
Unlike Virginia, the race in New Jersey is a foregone conclusion, with incumbent Gov. Chris Christie on his way to any easy victory over state Sen. Barbara Buono, D-Middlesex, the Democratic nominee.
Though polls show voters to be dissatisfied with many of Christie's policies, the governor is widely popular, thanks in no small part to his outgoing personality and leadership skills in the wake of last year's Hurricane Sandy that struck the New Jersey coastline.
Kaplan's ability to make an impact in the race is minimal. He was not allowed to participate in any of the debates because he was not included in any of the statewide polls conducted during the campaign, and he has not had a single television ad because he's shoestring campaign is running on a budget of less than $5,000 in an election when special interests on both sides have dumped millions into the coffers of the two major candidates.
But Kaplan says this is still a high water mark for Libertarians in New Jersey. When he ran for governor in 2009, he got less than one-half of 1 percent of the vote.
"It's going to be a Christie landslide, so if you want to protest Christie but you don't like the Democratic candidate, you can vote for me," he said Friday during an interview with Watchdog.org.
Growing up, Kaplan says his parents were liberal Democrats, but they were an entrepreneurial bunch who owned a men's clothing store in West Orange. That combination of social liberalism and business-friendly economics is what is missing in the political discussion today, he said.
While much of Sarvis' success is a rejection of the two major party candidates, something else seems to be happening, too — a philosophical shift towards a more socially liberal, while still fiscally conservative, Virginia. A place that's tolerant — but not when it comes to government over regulation or overspending.
Sarvis' campaign line boils it down: "Virginia — open-minded and open for business."
And with Virginia acting as a barometer for elections nationally, all eyes are on the race to see how well that philosophy does at the ballot box.
"To a certain degree I do think that the voter population as a whole is, if you look at polling, just even nationally, is economically a little more conservative, but socially a little liberal," said Geoff Skelley, political scientist with the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "That seems to be kind of the way things are going.
"From that perspective, I would think that kind of platform going forward could be a winning one with the right candidate," Skelley said.
That's what Sarvis hopes, too. Reaching the 10-percent threshold on Tuesday would pave the way for future candidates to get on the ballot and into the race.
Sarvis, who ran as a Republican for a Virginia State Senate seat in 2011 and lost, has come under fire recently for supposedly lacking pure Libertarian credentials. Although opposed to Medicaid expansion, he says things like he couldn't support expansion "absent" an overhaul of the system. And on taxes, he's suggested a miles-driven tax is one example of a transportation tax that would be more efficient than increasing the sales tax, which is what Virginia did this year.
"Nobody knows what can happen with whether we're going to find the candidates to run," Sarvis said last week in an interview with Watchdog.org. "But I certainly hope to help us search for candidates who can put forward a good message."
Just being on the New Jersey ballot is a victory for Kaplan. He said he knows that his policy plans — he wants to get rid of the state income tax by reducing state spending until it is no longer necessary, change state policy for housing density requirements and implement a tuition-based model for public education — would require more than just a Libertarian in the governor's mansion.
Asked if the Libertarians could be the third party that exploits the nation's dissatisfaction with the two major parties, Kaplan is both hopeful and reserved.
"I'm not sure that Libertarians will ever come to power, because we are principled and we are ideological," he said. "And that's not how people vote in this country. People vote for what they think the politicians will be able to do for them."
Kaplan was right — he won't win. Still, he and Sarvis say they run with the hopes that one day, Americans will value free markets, and a free society, more than things politicians can give them.
This article originally appeared on Watchdog.org.
The post Libertarians Offer Palatable Alternatives in Virginia and New Jersey Elections appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As far as flashy movie productions go, Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln may have it all—an award-winning cast, big-name director, and the historic locations in Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia to showcase the sprawling tale.
But like a starstruck paramour, Virginia has lavished countless gifts to win the heart of the big-studio production, offering sweet tax deals and sexy film grants to guarantee the state gets a piece of the fairest industry of them all, Hollywood.
"The only reason I can understand why they focus so much on the Hollywood industry is because it's kind of a sexy industry and the governor gets photo opportunities with movie stars," said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies for the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. "I think it's that superficial, which is frankly pathetic."
The film opens in theaters nationwide on Friday.
Behind the scenes, policy analysts and lawmakers say Lincoln, which received roughly $3.5 million in tax incentives ultimately from taxpayer pockets, offers a glimpse into Virginia's runaway tax preferential treatment to subjectively selected industries. It's a practice they say skews the level economic playing field and eats up tax revenue needed elsewhere.
"From my point of view, the state giving $5 million to a billionaire to make his movie in Virginia is a luxury our state can't afford right now when we are cutting education, Medicaid and the rest of our safety net," said Virginia Delegate Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax).
But Virginia isn't alone in this game of film favoritism. More than 40 states now offer tax incentives for filming in-state, creating a complicated and costly arms race, Edwards said.
"I think it's sort of like a cancer," he said. "It's getting worse and worse. The more states have special deals for certain industries, the more other states are induced to the same, and it's sort of like an arms race within the states that just leads to a more complex tax code."
The Virginia Film Office was established in 1980 to lure multimillion-dollar projects away from Hollywood and neighboring states.
The business incentives to entice these projects were sweetened in 2010, when Gov. Bob McDonnell signed Virginia's first film tax credit into law.
Feature films, made-for-TV movies, television shows, documentaries, and even commercials, filmed in Virginia are eligible for tax breaks through the Virginia Motion Picture Tax Credit Program. There is a litany of of tax code voodoo from which the studios can shave off production costs, including The Governor's Motion Picture Opportunity Fund. It make it easy for big productions like Lincoln to save a buck on their Virginia tax returns.
The theory is that with a healthy film industry, movie production can make an economic splash in the state, hiring skilled workers, actors and extras. The ripple effect spreads to industries that service the production, such as caterers, craftsmen, and others.
"For example, you've got the caterers who buy food and hire people to work catering the film," said Mary Nelson, communications manager for the Virginia Film Office. "The expanded impact then is that the grocer has to go out and purchase food from a distributor, who purchases it from a farmer. The grocer hires people to work in the grocery store and whatever. This is all economic theory, and it means any dollar spent in that community has greater impact than just that dollar."
That's what McDonnell spokesman Jeff Caldwell argued, too, saying the Lincoln production had direct expenditures of $32.4 million, for a total economic impact of $64.1 million. The company hired 1,1990 Virginia-based actors and extras and 380 crew members. The production used 23,580 room nights in local hotels and spread business to places like grocery stores, restaurants, hardware stores, and dry cleaners, he said.
"The incentives given to attract this major motion picture to shoot in Richmond were a direct investment in bringing jobs, tourism dollars, and investment into Virginia," Caldwell wrote in an emailed statement.
But like summer camp, movie productions are part of a "fly-by-night" industry, eventually coming to an end and taking their millions back to California to prepare for distribution, Cato's Edwards said.
Surovell said instead of chasing the celebrity culture that follows film productions, Virginia should be investing in long-term economic solutions and revenue growth.
"I also think that to the extent that we do spend money on economic development, it ought to be for projects that support permanent investments in Virginia and not sort of fleeting activities like movie productions," he said.
But the argued-for economic growth, according to a 2010 paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., doesn't even pay off. The paper claimed the state revenue the films generate falls far short of the cost of tax breaks and subsidies doled out to the productions. The best jobs go to skilled workers imported from the out-of-state studios.
Edwards said the economic argument for film industry tax incentives is flimsy, and shows the tax code is broken.
"I think that's a stupid argument they make," Edwards said. "If they focus on making the overall tax code low and fair and equal, they would attract industry, because industry would know that they could come to Virginia and Virginia would have a competitive and equal and fair tax structure."
And it's not like this industry needs any help, said Matt Mitchell, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax.
"This is not like spending money on orphans and infants or the elderly," Mitchell said. "These are pretty well-heeled production companies. It doesn't make a lot of sense to be raising the tax rates on everybody else in order to pay for basically concessions to well-heeled production companies."
Virginia's preferential treatment of the film industry, said Mark Daugherty, chairman of the Federation of Virginia Tea Party Patriots, is just one example of its "fundamentally unfair" tax favoritism, along with breaks for industries like beekeeping and wine. At its worst, it's nothing better than "crony capitalism," he said.
In offering preferential treatment to some industries over others, leaders can actually inhibit the growth they hope to create, Edwards said.
"The film incentives are really the poster child for what's wrong with (tax) incentives," Edwards said. "Economically, state governments should not be favoring some industries over others. I mean, why should the film industry be favored over some more mundane industry like furniture manufacturing? Virginia needs jobs in unsexy, normal industries like furniture manufacturing as well as fancy or artsy industries like the film industry. And we don't want politicians choosing which type of industries they think are good for Virginia."
And the negative effects of preferential treatment only snowball, leading to more lobbying and an arms race among the states for certain industries, said Edwards.
"If state policy makers start buying off certain industries with special deals it's going to encourage other industries to come forward and say, 'hey why don't we get the cool credits like this,' so it encourages more and more lobbying, and ultimately, that reduces the incentive for overall tax reform," said Edwards.
This article originally appeared at Watchdog.org.
The post How Steven Spielberg's <em>Lincoln</em> Benefited from Crony Capitalism appeared first on Reason.com.
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