A Case for Public Campaign Funding

            An e-mail message from the political party I am registered with informed me that it had come to their attention that after several requests, there had not been any donations associated with that e-mail address.  If they were wrong, then they apologized.  However, if they were correct they wanted to know why there hadn't been any donations?  Further, they wanted to know, what would take to get me to make a donation? There were several responses to choose from and I chose to tell them I was supporting the party in other ways and that frost warnings for Hell might break me out of donating slump.

            To say that I’m conservative in my spending and donating habits is not completely true.  I don’t have any spending habits and for a very long time I haven’t donated money to anything other than contributions to my wife’s charitable attitude towards our descendants.  If you listen closely, you can hear me squeak when I walk by.  So when a political party, candidate, or other entity asks me for money they are generally wasting resources.  Wasting resources is one of the reasons for my prohibition on campaign donations. 

            Quite a while back, I made a couple donations of twenty-five dollars each.  For me those were major monetary transfers.  After the checks cleared, the requests for more money ramped up so much that my twenty-five dollar checks could not have funded the effort for more than a few months.  It didn’t matter that there wasn’t any response to the requests.  The requests started to include warnings that each one was going to be the last and that model was repeated periodically for years.  Once you’re in the database as a contributor, the files never seem to be purged of deadbeats.

            When the money isn’t being wasted on ineffective mailings, what is it being used for?  Swift-boat style attack ads or misleading spin-speech?  I don’t like that stuff coming from campaigns that I don’t agree with, why would I fund that garbage for an issue or politician I support?  I know, I know, because it works.  That’s not good enough for me because I don’t have money to throw around like that.  When I consider what I could have done with those two donations of twenty-five dollars each, it really grates on me what the recipients did with them.

            Consider for a moment what could be done with the millions, maybe billions of dollars, of campaign war-chest money if it were to be spent on something other than political indulgences.  A lot of the problems the politicians and campaigns claim they are going to fix could get fixed with the campaign donations and without any additional tax money being spent.  It is all relative to how much money you have to spend.  If you have lots of money, then you can have fun spending on whatever you want including spending some of it on politics.  If you spend lots of money to get things to go your way, then the people who don’t want that to happen – including people with less money -- will use up their limited resources trying to match your contributions and/or you’ll out spend them so much that they will eventually give up and you win.  It’s a game for the super rich and it is good source of income for professional political advisors, for many professional political campaign organizers, and, most certainly, for advertisers. 

            Politicos say that public funding won’t work for political campaigns.  One claim is that there wouldn’t be enough money to run the campaigns.  I agree that there wouldn’t be enough money to run the campaigns the way they are run now.  However, if campaign funding was severely limited, then perhaps, the campaigners would have to stick more to the facts and the issues.  Even if a campaign wanted to run a negative attack, the limited funding might tend to force the attack to be a more truthful negative attack since there wouldn’t be funding for the big shotgun-blasting-mud-slinging-see-what-sticks type of negative campaigning that we have to endure now.   

            Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few nights during the month proceeding the election when the candidates and the campaigns spent some time describing the issues as they see them and telling us what they intended to do to make things better?  You could have some paper and a pencil ready to take some notes for comparisons.  After you did your comparisons, you could decide how you wanted to vote without all the confusion and frustration that we go through every election cycle now.  With the money you saved by not having to make political contributions to save the shade trees on your street or enrich some political candidate’s campaign advisors, you could go out to eat after you get done voting.  You might even have money to contribute to a truly worthwhile cause where they used your money to accomplish something.