I’d love to get money out of politics. Make political advertising illegal. Give candidates a web site to post their resume. That’s it. No more tv, radio, magazine, web, or newspaper campaign ads.
A two month campaign season would help. Political donations may only occur between Labor Day and Election Day. No donations, fundraisers, or campaigning may occur before or after those dates.
As long as we’re making a wishlist, I’ll also take a spending max for the main campaign combined with any supporting PAC (i.e. no shell PACs pretending to be regular citizens supporting a candidate on their own dime). No more billionaire bankrolling to simply outspend the average person.
The trouble with a time-limted campaign is that it’s a big country, and politics are local. You’d basically hamstring every candidate who does not have a national profile.
Nationally funded campaigns are the best path to getting money out of politics. Money isn’t speech, and donations to candidates should be entirely illegal. If anyone wants to run issue ads, that’s fine, make your case to the American public and disclose the source of the funds. But endorsing a specific candidate is quid pro quo bribery.
Each state funds its own events, and qualifying candidates get a stipend for travel and lodging. No staff, no speech writers, just the candidates and their ideas. Show up, make your case, move on to the next state. 50 debates would cost a tiny fraction of what we spend now, and it would be our money buying it.
There are a thousand kinks in our electoral process, from balloting to gerrymandering to disenfranchisement, but none of it gets fixed while the process is inherently corrupted by legal bribery.
Campaigns for public office should be limited to evenly distributed funds to all candidates with routine audits and disbursement windows to start the campaign season at the right time and prevent electoral burnout. This would also remove corporate backers like oil and military weapons for paying to win an election by burying their opponents through outspending.
Anytime a democracy let’s money decide who speaks, it let’s the richest say what they want while everyone else has to listen. A democracy which treats each candidate the same is the one which elects the best leaders.
The issue I could see with this is that political groups would have a very strong incentive to get around this and would try to push the limits of it. For example, if advertising about specific candidates is made illegal, groups might make ads promoting or attacking certain political positions instead, as a proxy for the candidates. If you make political advertising for anything illegal, even if not mentioning a specific candidate, then it would get even more thorny, because almost anything can be a political issue. For example, some right-wing political group might try to claim that gay marriage is a political issue and that any depiction of it in media is therefore advertising a stance on it, and sue anyone showing such on those grounds to try to silence people they don’t like.
Finally, political groups might just buy ads using organizations based outside the country, or use the advertising money instead on hiring people to go on social media and shill for their preferred candidates or positions, having the same effect as advertising without actually running ads.
Outlaw fundraising, give every candidate that can get enough signatures $20,000 to run for office, let them compete on ideas, give each candidate the same amount of air time on TV. I think Japan does something like this.
I don’t know if Japan is such a great example for politics though. They have a ton of corruption and religion mixed in (Moonies). Also, we kind of set it up for them after the war. I’m not a historian on it, so I don’t know if they set it up exactly like it used to be in the US, or set up something new.
I’d love to get money out of politics. Make political advertising illegal. Give candidates a web site to post their resume. That’s it. No more tv, radio, magazine, web, or newspaper campaign ads.
This shit is obscene.
A two month campaign season would help. Political donations may only occur between Labor Day and Election Day. No donations, fundraisers, or campaigning may occur before or after those dates.
As long as we’re making a wishlist, I’ll also take a spending max for the main campaign combined with any supporting PAC (i.e. no shell PACs pretending to be regular citizens supporting a candidate on their own dime). No more billionaire bankrolling to simply outspend the average person.
I would like public funding of elections and a dragon
What color dragon do you want?
The trouble with a time-limted campaign is that it’s a big country, and politics are local. You’d basically hamstring every candidate who does not have a national profile.
Nationally funded campaigns are the best path to getting money out of politics. Money isn’t speech, and donations to candidates should be entirely illegal. If anyone wants to run issue ads, that’s fine, make your case to the American public and disclose the source of the funds. But endorsing a specific candidate is quid pro quo bribery.
Each state funds its own events, and qualifying candidates get a stipend for travel and lodging. No staff, no speech writers, just the candidates and their ideas. Show up, make your case, move on to the next state. 50 debates would cost a tiny fraction of what we spend now, and it would be our money buying it.
There are a thousand kinks in our electoral process, from balloting to gerrymandering to disenfranchisement, but none of it gets fixed while the process is inherently corrupted by legal bribery.
Campaigns for public office should be limited to evenly distributed funds to all candidates with routine audits and disbursement windows to start the campaign season at the right time and prevent electoral burnout. This would also remove corporate backers like oil and military weapons for paying to win an election by burying their opponents through outspending.
Anytime a democracy let’s money decide who speaks, it let’s the richest say what they want while everyone else has to listen. A democracy which treats each candidate the same is the one which elects the best leaders.
The issue I could see with this is that political groups would have a very strong incentive to get around this and would try to push the limits of it. For example, if advertising about specific candidates is made illegal, groups might make ads promoting or attacking certain political positions instead, as a proxy for the candidates. If you make political advertising for anything illegal, even if not mentioning a specific candidate, then it would get even more thorny, because almost anything can be a political issue. For example, some right-wing political group might try to claim that gay marriage is a political issue and that any depiction of it in media is therefore advertising a stance on it, and sue anyone showing such on those grounds to try to silence people they don’t like.
Finally, political groups might just buy ads using organizations based outside the country, or use the advertising money instead on hiring people to go on social media and shill for their preferred candidates or positions, having the same effect as advertising without actually running ads.
Outlaw fundraising, give every candidate that can get enough signatures $20,000 to run for office, let them compete on ideas, give each candidate the same amount of air time on TV. I think Japan does something like this.
I don’t know if Japan is such a great example for politics though. They have a ton of corruption and religion mixed in (Moonies). Also, we kind of set it up for them after the war. I’m not a historian on it, so I don’t know if they set it up exactly like it used to be in the US, or set up something new.