Bill and Hillary have a net worth of over $110,000,000 and Donald Trump has a net worth in excess of $1,000,000,000.
BOTH candidates are asking people to donate money for their campaigns.
It only takes $75,000 a year to be “happy”.
So why do these people ask us for more money so that they can get what they want?
Can anyone give me a sound, moral, ethical, just reason why both candidates can’t just spend their own money?
Well, okay a campaign costs a billion dollars so why can’t The Donald fund his by himself and why can’t the Clintons put a cap on their requested donations at $900,000,000 and spend their own money?
Please share widely!
If we start getting used to this idea only the wealthy will be able to run. Besides, elections are a public exercise and I think there is something to be said for asking people to be part of something in this way. Then again, I would favor public funding as the best option.
Millionaires and billionaires asking poor people to fund their dreams is a precedent I’d like to get rid of.
the Presidency were some kind of amusement park ride.
The whole premise of this diary is oddly incoherent.
It springs from a fundamental difficulty in thinking about policy. Resentment rarely writes the best laws.
Who said it doesn’t pay to be a politician? I thought Clinton, Inc was in debt by the end of Bill’s 2nd term.
why can’t someone making 75k a year run? You’re argument says they can’t run, why not?
Would you support a publicly funded option or is that a tax thing you don’t like.
But they ought not be allowed to accept donations if they have reached a certain level of wealth.
Yeah, I’d support a publicly funded system as the law, not just an option. Get the $$$$ OUT of politics as much as we can.
$100 max donations up to $450,000 then public funds. They turned into a negative and repealed it. But lower dollar donations and cap seems like the only solution. The dollar amount pf 110,000,000 will exclude mostly everyone from running. The amount self/donation amount needs to be significant but not that high.
Public funding of Presidential campaigns still exists. It was NOT repealed. However most candidates eschew it as the total funds available does not make a candidate competitive in the days of independent expenditures or super-funded opponents. The maximum donation is $250, not $100.
The “Clean Elections” law was a state law, not the same as the older federal Presidential public funding law.
http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/pubfund.shtml#anchor684182
Yes, I was referring to MA law which I liked, not presidential. In MA, those were the dollar amounts.
That’s where we need to go, it didn’t work here and was voted out by referendum. It’s unfortunate.
Thanks for the link.
The Clean Elections law was enacted by voter referendum in 1998. It was repealed by the legislature in 2003 as an outside section of the GA bill after a protracted assault by members of both parties and both chambers, most notably by Tom Finneran.
Sure, it was badly drafted and the campaign leaders were a mix of ignorant about the real causes of legislative rank-and-file kowtowing, and arrogant in their approach (anybody else remember their horrific attempt to take over the House chamber during a legislative session?) but if it had been handled properly it could have been a big improvement in bringing new blood into the Great and General Court. We can thank Janice Fine, Dave Donnelly and former Rep Marc Draisen for both the initial effort and their complete fuck up of the politics during and after the referendum.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/21/us/massachusetts-legislature-repeals-clean-elections-law.html
I guess the most ‘moral’ and ‘just’ reason for candidates not spending their own money is Bernie Sanders. That is to say, somebody who doesn’t particularly have a lot of it, can still go far on fundraising. You’re argument to that might invoke a two-tier system in which the wealthy explicitly play by different rules. Don’t go there.
But, ultimately, having nothing whatsoever to do with sound, moral, ethical or just reasons, there is more to do with practicality and efficiency, so it’s unlikely you’ll find them satisfactory. The main reason is the difference between ‘money’ and ‘wealth’.
In short, they’re not real-life versions of ‘Scrooge McDuck’ and don’t, in fact, have much, if any, of that wealth in cash in hand (money). Bill Clinton isn’t actually sitting on an actual stack of Benjamins. Under certain circumstances they could take loans against their net worth, but then they’d truly become beholden to big banks, which banks might be in a position to make or break them at a time solely of the banks choosing (imagine the kerfuffle if, after winning the nomination, a number of banks declined to renew Hillary Clintons loans…? Can you imagine the 19 some odd GOP contenders vying for attention from big banks looking for big loans…? And the banks deciding who gets what?) And, from there it’s only a short step to ‘private loans.’ If they could, the Koch Brothers would have ‘loaned’ Scott Walker a billion dollars and he’d likely be the GOP nominee right now… But, even if the lender-politican relationship could be made to work legally and ethically, the interest alone makes that prohibitive for larger and larger sums… so there’s a diminishing return.
Even the ‘happy’ person making $75K/yr doesn’t have much of that wealth in cash in hand. That salary affords them the opportunity to purchase real estate in a neighborhood to their liking or otherwise live in a manner of comfort. Money doesn’t, per se, require civilization. Wealth, however, does.
I’m tired of the .1% running things, aren’t you?
..If you’re looking for a guarantee of a particular outcome, you’ve come to the wrong democracy, friend.
I’m not sure what you mean by “running things…” money has a lot of influence, sure, but I don’t think it has control in any meaningful way. The attendant chaos and whiplash politics (Clinton followed by Dubya followed by Obama… wheee…!) suggests that nobody is, in fact, in control. I’m sorry I can’t make sense of the world better than that, despite how much you may want it to, but there it is.
Follow the money. That’s who’s running things. If you have not noticed, labor has not had a raise in 40+ years and almost none the recovery from the last recession went to labor. Who did it go to? That’s who’s running things.
could be the best tool. If we can get a video of a bear walking on it’s hind legs to go viral why can’t we get candidates to succinctly present their ideas and let the vine process play out.
“Hillary on housing” “Donald on minimum wage” “Gary on honest government” (my favorite). They have 2-3 minutes (avg attention span) and stay on topic, no attacking the others. First campaign to figure this out will do all campaigns a favor.
There will be some “Rent is too damn high” people, but what can you do. Then a TV showing of the top 15-20 posts of the week.
I am sure that most people who give money to campaigns are fully capable of deciding how much they want to give and whether the candidate really needs the money or not.
If you have given money to a campaign before then you probably recognize that doing so, even if it is only a small amount, is a genuine investment on your part. Even if the candidate could have entirely self-funded, getting people to take that step and invest in their campaign will result in supporters who are more psychologically committed to the candidate. Furthermore, once you get people to give money to the Presidential candidate, you may also be able to get them to give to other candidates in the same party.
BTW, I am not trying to defend the obscene amount of money spent in elections these days, but fixing that is probably going to require finding a way to undo Citizens United, and that probably will require either flipping the Supreme Court or getting a Constitutional amendment passed.
Money that drowns out the voice of the people. Too many of the .1% running things. Reversing Citizens United would be a step in the proper direction, but Democrats are about to nominate a person whose political odds of re-election (assuming a victory in 2016) would be greatly diminished without the tools that Citizens United provided.