If party and candidate spending is limited without corresponding limits on third-party spending, parties and candidates may be forced to use their limited spending capacity to “fend off attacks” by third parties rather than advertising their policy positions.

crowd out, smaller individual contributions."

An equality-based justification for campaign finance regulation must recognize that the modern regulatory framework can only superficially reduce the impact of economic inequality.

On the other hand, donating and spending on a large scale are taxed at an everincreasing rate, which is beneficial as well. Because of this property, the rich would face arising marginal cost as they tried to exert more financial influence.

However, only the square root of the amount that they donate or spend, multiplied byan amount set to make the system as a whole budget-neutral, would actually be deployed.The rest of the money would enter the public Treasury. Assume, for example, that amultiplier of 10 would make the system budget-neutral. Then if a person donated $1 toBernie Sanders, his campaign would receive $10 (($1^.5)910). Similarly, if a personwanted to independently spend $10,000 to back Donald Trump (or if Trump wanted tospend $10,000 on his own candidacy), $1000 could be used on commercials, mailers, andthe like (($10,000^.5)910), and the other $9000 would go to the government.

Examining inequality across provinces and time has many advantages.2 Canadian provinces possess considerable comparable autonomy in administering social policy and research shows that inequality shifts are predominantly owing to provincial rather than federal transfers

hat effect, if any, does the extent of economic inequality in a country have upon the political engagement of its citizens?