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.