If Money Equals Speech, It’s Time For Political Campaigns To Shut Up

It’s time for publicly financed campaigns, period. If it’s good enough for other advanced democracies like England and Germany — where the government limits campaign spending by being the sole source of funding them — then it’s good enough for the U.S. Because this money-equals-free-speech thing clearly has gotten out of hand.

A few things stand outhere:


  • Obama trumped Romneyin individual campaign contributions $556M to $340M, but Romney lapped Obamawith three times the Super PAC money.
  • Romney’s biggest statefor campaign contributions was California,a state he had no chance of winning.
  • Two-thirds of Obama’scontributions came from small donors (< $200) while Romney’s largestcontributor group was large donors ($2000+).
  • The vaunted Obama“ground game” was 18% of his campaign’s overall spending (payroll andadministration, for a total of $135.8M), double the spending of the Romneycampaign’s 10% of spending ($63.9M).
  • The combined campaignsspent $2.85 for every man, woman, and child (U.S. population 314,785,298Americans as per Census.govNovember 18, 2012). Add in thesuper PACs, and total election spending grows to $4.58 per American. Just get mea gallon of gas if you’re trying to buy my vote.
  • Lincoln’s campaign is the closest thing we’ve seen tosensible campaign finance spending. It’s time we brought that back (keep the stovepipe hat, though).
Nostalgia

Crayola has retired just 13 colors in 123 years. The first 8 led to protests.

Wholesome

His trumpet broke halfway through the national anthem. So he grabbed a mic and started singing.

Nature

A man lost track of his late dad’s beagle for 10 years. Then a Florida rescue scanned her microchip.

Culture

In 1990, Marge Simpson ‘wrote’ to Barbara Bush for ‘criticizing her family.’ It got an apology.