I think this is a fascinating topic.
I'm going to take the last part first. I do not think that we should lower the contribution limit, because it's already quite low. If we lower that, I don't see what it would accomplish. For example, it's around $1,650 or $1,700, and if you went lower than that, you wouldn't be achieving anything. I really don't think there's an issue by way of any negative outcome that's going to happen at the $1,700 level that would be different if we were to allow $1,400. I just don't see it. Most political contributions are nowhere near in that ballpark. The last time I saw the statistics, they were less than $200. I really have no idea what we would accomplish by doing that.
I think there is, perhaps, an optimal balance—maybe this is a conceptual thing—between the amount of money that political parties get from private sources and the amount of money that they get from public sources. You want political parties to want to compete for donations. That is a test of whether they're resonating with the public. That is accountability for political parties. If you're raising money, it should be because your ideas resonate. That's not always the way it works.
On the other hand, the public funding is not.... I don't see that as an investment, really, in a particular party. It's an investment in a party system. It's an investment in a competition. We need to make sure, I think, that even though you don't want to make parties entirely reliant on that—because we shouldn't have taxpayers or the consolidated revenue fund paying entirely for political parties' contributions and competitions—I think there's value in investing in a democracy to make sure, again, that you can see parties go, over time, and be able to count on a certain amount of funding. Otherwise, how you did in the last election is too much of a determinant for how you do going forward. Then we get a self-fulfilling situation, which I don't think is valuable.