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I can't wait to see direct sponsorship in Presidencies. How cool will it be to see our national leaders decked out like Nascar drivers? This will certainly take away our fearsome image overseas. Now we will take our place electing the product that best suits our consumer driven hearts. They will rule from the Bank-Atlantic House with pride, and fly aboard Delta-1. Welcome to the age of the Ovaltine office!

The issue is not McDonalds giving money to Senator X, and therefor you vote for Senator X. The problem is after Senator ZX is eleceted McDonalds gives money to Senator X and Senator X votes in favor of a bill that benefits McDonalds, or votes against a bill that harms McDonalds.

Can that happen? Yes. But even with the rules in place now all McDonalds needs to do is setup a few PAC's and they can do it anyway. All this decission does is cut out the middle man.

Dal'yth Dude @ So you have a problem with a company becasue it lacks morals, but not the politician that lacks such morals that he will allow himself to be bought?

Gen. Lee Losing wrote:

Da Boss wrote:If you think money has no effect, you're insane.

Oh it definitely has an effect. Don’t get me wrong.

But the recent Brown win in Mass is another example of the side that spent less winning.

It's not just a question of who has more money winning. Money guarantees exposure. Were there only two candidates on the recent MA Senate ballot? I heard there was a Libertarian candidate on the ballot. Did he get much exposure? What about non-national candidates such as state and local elections? If Wal-Mart wants to put in stores in New York City don't you think they'll spend some money to elect politicians that would let them do so?

Is it so hard to accept the idea that if one cannot vote, one cannot spend [edit: unlimited ]money on campaigns?

Dal'yth Dude wrote:

Gen. Lee Losing wrote:


Is it so hard to accept the idea that if one cannot vote, one cannot spend [edit: unlimited ]money on campaigns?

Not exactly. They way I take this statement is if you can't vote you don't get a voice in the matter. Just cause you can't vote does not mean legislation does not affect you.

Gen. Lee Losing wrote:But the recent Brown win in Mass is another example of the side that spent less winning.

I just feel that effects can be overstated. If McDonalds starts pumping billions into a politician’s campaign, I will still vote my conscience. There are always attacks on the guy that I am rooting for. Doesn’t change the opinion of the vast majority of people.

There has been some interesting studies into this kind of thing. It appears that you need a certain amount of money to compete at all, measured in tens of millions for any federal seat, and several hundred million for a presidential campaign, but once you reach that point additional money doesn't make that much difference. The problem isn't with a corporate sponsored candidate outspending and beating a candidate with no corporate sponsorship, the problem is that raising corporate sector money is a lot easier than raising public sector money, and for this reason alone it will be very rare that a candidate will get more than a small portion of his war chest from private citizens. When a bill comes up that contrasts the interests of the people vs the corporaration making big contributions to the politician, the people are going to lose.

Look at the HCR debacle. How many people out there were really worried about making sure private insurers were looked after, but then you look at the content of the final bill and it makes no sense that there could be so much in there for private insurers. Then you look at where the contributions to the DNC and it starts making sense.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

jbunny wrote:Dal'yth Dude @ So you have a problem with a company becasue it lacks morals, but not the politician that lacks such morals that he will allow himself to be bought?

The reality is that you will never have a completely moral population, but you can build a system where there is less incentive towards immorality.

The problem isn't people buying election wins. You can't just expect that the side with the most money wins.

The problem is politicians being obligated to certain groups (lobby groups, corporations, unions, whatever) because of the large amount of campaign funding they received. This makes it so that special interest groups have a larger impact on legislature. Remember, once we elect representatives, they make the decisions. Yes, they're accountable to us, but with too much funding, they'll feel obligated to these special interest groups. Which takes some of our participation out of the democracy.