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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.
11.20.12
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).