Today thousand, millions, or even billions of dollars can be spent on campaigns for local and state politician’s campaigns. In 1999 when now Mayer Martin O’Malley was running to be mayor of Baltimore, the City Paper reported that he raise 1,698,037.52 dollars. When it comes to raising money for campaigns, how much is too much? At a certain point doesn’t it make the race unfair? In many cases the person who raises and uses the most amount of money for the campaign is more likely to win the election. It seems that the best possible candidate may not when because of an inability to raise financial funds. There are certain reforms that I would put into place to make the playing field more level for all candidates involved in an election.
The first thing that I would change would be the donations from special interest groups. There should be limitations and caps on how much campaign money can be allowed from there groups. This could be done fairly by implementing this by a percentage base. For example only twenty-five percent of all total funds can be from interest groups. If this was done it would cut back greatly on large amounts of money being donated to candidates to try to swing them to their side. Another thing I would reform is amount a single private donor can contribute. This can be done by putting a cap say on a two or three thousand donation by a private person. The last and final thing that could be done to reform campaign finances is putting limitations on actual campaigning. An example of this is restricting campaign television commercials till fifty days before the election or limiting areas in which they can adversities causing them to need less money. These changes could lead to a more equal playing field among elections as well as cutting down political corruption.
How much is too much?
By bleedingheart - Posted on February 27th, 2009
Tagged: Campaign
• campaign money
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I mostly hate the influence of money on our political process but I think it is inevitable. I don't completely hate it because in some ways it reflects the market at work. The more popular guy raises the most money. But some special interest groups are very rich and they can buy un-due and perhaps corrupting influence.
Everything you suggested and a lot more has already been tried and it never works. People always find away around the laws. Money is just too easy to shift around. If you can't give it to the politician, you give it to a group that is sympathetic and supportive to the politician and who will spend it in ways that will help the politician. There is no stopping it. At some point if you get too aggressive trying to stop the money you start to engage in violations of free speech and freedom of the press that are even more damaging to the country then the influence of money. Do we really want to regulate what a group with money can say in a paid advertisement in the newspaper or on TV? That leads down a frightening path of the government being in charge of regulating political speech.
In this most recent election, to avoid the personal caps on contributions, people purchased pre-paid debit cards under fake names and gave them to the Obama campaign. He got millions of annonymous dollars.
I think a better solution to the problem of money is to quit regulating how much and who can give what but just make politicians publish every dime of contributions on a real-time public website along with the name, organization and address that is associated with each contribution. The money cannot be stopped but it would at least be nice for voters to know where it is coming from and who is buying themselves a heaping serving of political influence.
If a politician receives money (like a pre-paid debit card in the name of Mickey Mouse) that cannot be matched to a real person, they should be forced to donate it to a charity of their choice.