With eight days to go before Election Day 2012, the sums that each party has managed to amass are staggering, fully a billion dollars raised by each side, with a total of over $2 billion for the entirety of the presidential campaign.
That’s a lot of purchases at the dollar store
$2 billion is a lot of money, it is the same amount as 7,000 homes in America, four years college tuition for 57,800 students, and a year’s worth of health coverage for 127,000 families. Thanks to the Supreme Courts ruling that anyone can donate unlimited sums to Super PACs, operating independently of candidates, a lot of this money went straight to attack ads, and propagated misinformation from both sides. This is a complete waste of money and energy.
Who benefits from the money spent on campaigning? People who work on campaigns and receive salaries, media outlets, especially TV channels where ad money is spent, and the candidate who wins. In this regard, Romney is a hedge bet for millionaires, donate a few million and Romney will change the tax structure making it possible for millionaires to be taxed less in the future, ideally saving them more money than they donated.
But special interest groups also benefit. They raise a lot of money to use as influence over candidates, to ensure that candidates appeal to them and agree to fight for them on the national stage. The threat of losing that funding the next time around means that politicians can’t stray from their promises.
In the end, it is a spider web made from the stickiest material that ensnares candidates from early in their careers, and is amplified on the national level. In our opinion, Romney is much more indebted to his major donors than Obama, whose donations are spread along a much wider spectrum of interests. Either way, this system is broken, and there must be someway that this money and energy can be used in a productive way.