I was really surprised for a second. 5 billion raised is a huge sum which would mean either mass contributions from extremely wealthy individuals or that pretty much everybody is US chipped in. 5 million though is less than 1% of what was spent on presidential elections alone by each side (Obama side spent 779M, Romney side 704M [1]). This is not counting what is being spent in congressional, state, local, etc. elections and what is being spent on one-issue campaigns. For example, just prop 8 campaign in California took 70M [2].
I am not sure what exactly these guys plan to do (my conviction is any law compatible with the First Amendment can not prevent political spending as public speech on national scale costs a lot of money and content-based regulations on such speech to exclude political speech are in direct contradiction with current understanding of First Amendment both by the courts and the public) and their descriptions are very vague ("agnostic about the specific legislation") - I don't think 5 million is going to take them too far. They might support some candidates from the left that already campaign on the issue of "big money stole our politics" (while taking big money like everybody else of course) but those guys were already for it anyway, and I don't think you can tip too many congressional elections with 5 million. We'll see I guess.
The most recent bills that I saw Lessig speaking in favor of provided candidates with public funding that was equivalent to what they could get from the PACs and gave voters vouchers that they could give to the candidate of their choice who agreed to the public funding.
It's compatible with the idea that super PACs are legal, but provides a more voter-friendly alternative source of funding.
1.5 billion of public funding? That's quite fat piece of change from public coffers, and that's just for one presidential campaign. But more importantly, availability of public funding does not solve the problem of restricting political speech in any way. So imagine we put 1.5 bn of public spending in the campaign. What prevents the candidates from spending another 1.5 bn of private money? The private money spending is limited only by the amounts people are willing to spend to support their causes. Adding public money to that does not change it (unless you somehow conclude people would not be willing to donate anymore, but this is an unsupported assumption). So unless you prohibit people from spending money on political speech - I do not see how public funding changes the picture.
1) Most likely there are diminishing marginal returns from more advertising. That is true in most industries, based on may understanding (I have no expertise in the field). I suspect, though I have no evidence, that the returns diminish significantly.
2) Public funding would remove large amounts of money as a barrier to entry into campaigns. Even if the candidate didn't have much as those with other sources, they could run a realistic campaign.
3) Public funding would greatly reduce the need for elected officials to spend time fundraising, which many say takes significant time from their responsibilities of governing.
4) "1.5 billion of public funding? That's quite fat piece of change from public coffers": It's not a small number, but it's $5/citizen. I think (and I think many Americans would agree) that it's a very small price for removing money from politics.
1. There probably are diminishing marginal returns, the question is are we at that point? The amount of donations solicited suggests the returns are still pretty good. The politicians don't take big money because they love the dependence - nobody loves it. They take the money because they expect the money will make them more likely to be elected. And so far I haven't seen any campaign saying "well, we don't need money anymore, thank you, give the rest to the Salvation Army".
2. That's true - however, if somebody can not find enough supporters that want to put their money where their mouth is - how likely it is this candidate would be elected? If the candidate is so marginal nobody want to back him/her - the public money would be just wasted.
3. That would only be true if other form of political campaigning were banned, which, as I previously said, is incompatible with the First Amendment. Otherwise, the candidate that does public funds + fundraising would win over the candidate that has just public funds, so fundraising will continue and the only thing achieved is that the politicians would get some free taxpayer money to play with. Don't they already have quite enough of that?
4. It's $5/citizen for one campaign. And that includes citizens that never paid any income taxes, due to being poor, underage or otherwise exempt. And those are quite numerous. Real figure per taxpayer would be much higher, and it's not like we have huge surplus in the budgets waiting to be spent. And, of course, as I mentioned, this won't remove money from politics - and it can not, since money is just a form of expressing one's desires, and if the citizens want to participate in the politics, giving money to the causes they like is how they do it. If you ban it, you replace citizens giving money to causes with bureaucrats giving money to causes. I don't think I'd pay even 5 cents for this.
I am not sure what exactly these guys plan to do (my conviction is any law compatible with the First Amendment can not prevent political spending as public speech on national scale costs a lot of money and content-based regulations on such speech to exclude political speech are in direct contradiction with current understanding of First Amendment both by the courts and the public) and their descriptions are very vague ("agnostic about the specific legislation") - I don't think 5 million is going to take them too far. They might support some candidates from the left that already campaign on the issue of "big money stole our politics" (while taking big money like everybody else of course) but those guys were already for it anyway, and I don't think you can tip too many congressional elections with 5 million. We'll see I guess.
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/49550998/ [2] http://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_8,_the_%22Elim...