Karen Bass Wants You to Fund Her Campaign With Your Own Tax Dollars

There’s something almost impressive about the sheer audacity on display here. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, standing in front of a camera with that practiced political smile, actually made a campaign video explaining how your tax dollars will match donations to her reelection effort at a rate of six to one. Not three to one. Not even four to one. Six to one. She said this out loud, with upbeat music playing, like she was announcing a clearance sale at Target.

Let me make sure I understand this correctly. If someone donates a hundred bucks to Bass’s campaign, the city of Los Angeles kicks in six hundred dollars of taxpayer money. That’s your money, by the way. Money that could fix potholes or hire more police officers or do literally anything else besides padding a politician’s war chest. But instead, it goes straight into the reelection fund of the person already sitting in the mayor’s office.

The program is called the “super match” initiative, which sounds like something a marketing team cooked up after too many lattes. Bass explains in the video that after the primary, they had to start over from scratch, so she needs supporters to “rush” their matching donations right now. The urgency is palpable. The lack of self-awareness is even more so.

You know what’s fascinating about this whole setup? It’s legal. Completely above board. Los Angeles voters actually approved this system, believing it would somehow reduce the influence of big money in politics by amplifying small donations. The theory was that matching public funds would level the playing field. The reality is that incumbents like Bass can leverage the entire apparatus of city government to remind people that their twenty dollar contribution magically becomes a hundred and forty dollars for her campaign.

This is the kind of thing that makes ordinary Americans lose faith in the whole system. It’s not corruption in the traditional sense. Nobody’s stuffing envelopes with cash or meeting in parking garages. It’s all perfectly legal graft, sanitized and approved by the very people it benefits. The establishment calls it democracy reform. Everyone else calls it what it is.

And let’s talk about timing for a second. Los Angeles is still recovering from devastating fires. The city faces a homelessness crisis that’s spiraled completely out of control. Crime remains a persistent concern for residents who just want to feel safe in their own neighborhoods. But Bass found time to cut a campaign video explaining the mechanics of taxpayer-funded campaign contributions. Priorities, right?

The conservative position on this couldn’t be clearer. Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers in elections, period. That includes funding campaigns with public money. If you can’t raise enough private donations to run a competitive race, maybe that’s the market telling you something. Maybe voters aren’t that interested. Using tax dollars to amplify support artificially isn’t democracy. It’s welfare for politicians.

Bass seems genuinely excited about this arrangement, which tells you everything you need to know about how disconnected she is from the people actually footing the bill. That lapel microphone picked up every word of her pitch-perfect enthusiasm for spending other people’s money on herself. The video went viral for all the wrong reasons, but something tells me the lesson won’t stick.

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