That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general
inefficiency [...] Americans have simply ponied up more
and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that
they were getting less and less for their money.
There's a general effect in political systems, that if a law takes $20 from 1,000,000 people and gives $100,000 to 200 people, the people who lose money won't have enough incentive to put up a big fight; but the people who receive money will have more than enough motivation.
For example, if a big irrigation project will force taxpayers to subsidise corporate farms, the corporations have a big incentive to spend on ads and campaign contributions. Or if you have to give $60 to a private company for tax filing software, they have a big incentive to lobby and make campaign contributions to keep the tax system complicated.
I'm sure construction projects are subject to the same pro-waste incentives.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is - campaign finance reform, perhaps?
Abso-fucking-lutely. I think in order to run at any levels of office, you should be using public money. For simplification, let's say if one wants to run for president, they can only use whatever is in the FEC public coffers. In return, we levy a federal FEC tax to boost it way higher than its current rates. We replicate a similar tax at state and local levels. Completely remove private donations and PACs and all that shit from the lawbooks. A fuckload of people want to run for president? Well, you better get creative with your tiny slice of the pie. Show us how fiscally responsible you really are.
People would scream and holler about it not being American, but it's one of the only ways, I think, to really take a large stab at our chronic corruption.
Expecting Washington to determine who is a serious candidate (and then policing their use of federal funds) is a major conflict of interest, because policymakers will almost certainly set standards that benefit the two entrenched parties. I've toyed with an alternative concept, though, that might achieve the same effect with less required oversight.
The idea is a sort of non-partisan "un-PAC" -- a fundraising organization explicitly dedicated to combating corporate political donations. If a presidential candidate or his affiliated PACs recieved eg. $5MM in fundraising from oil executives, the un-PAC would spend $5MM on negative advertising linking him in the public's mind with that industry. If the un-PAC raised enough money, eventually a large multiple of corporate donations could be spent counteracting them, and at some point it would become uneconomical for politicians to accept those donations at all.
We spent about $6B on the 2016 federal elections (https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/cost.php). That comes out to about $20 for every American. That's a big number to beat, but not impossible, and every bit along the way helps.
I had an idea somewhere along the lines of your un-PAC. However, the one I imagined would hire lobbyists who would shmooze politicians to pass anti-lobbying laws. The PAC's job would get harder and harder the more successful it was.
If businesses have a hundred different ways to gain special market advantages by simply having political influence then 100% their money should not be able to influence politics.
This should be more obvious in US (and Canadian) politics than it is. But politicians are rarely willing to admit their malleability when it comes to both businesses and non-profit organizations (or special interest groups) influencing them. So the problem persists.
This is a big thing many small-government conservatives seem to miss. They think that capping financing of political parties is anti-business. But in reality it's only incumbent businesses who fleece the government for contracts or exploit government policy to create barriers of entry for their competitors who back ending these policies.
Even though small/medium business represents 60%+ of employment they are largely ignored policy-wise. Then when big-corps exploit market dynamics then ever more regulation are put in place that only hurts the small businesses rather than the big corps (see: minimum wage).
So those of us who support small-government, we're often left with only choosing between big government liberals who are indifferent to the ROI of ever-expanding government power/tax base or small government conservatives who let corporate influence in politics run free. It's difficult to tell which one results in the most abuse these days.
Even if this stops being a problem it has existed for decades and these 'gray' connections between politics and business is everywhere in North America. It would take decades to reverse their influence which is a shame because it's very existence is self-reinforcing (much like those organizations whose very existence depends on the continuation of government financing as opposed to depending on their utility to the public).
I'm not doubting that money buys influence, but it's not even necessary. There are enough potential politicians with enough different viewpoints that all you need to do is find one already pushing your agenda, and back them.
That still would limit the number of politicians who appreciate your niche political issue. Especially considering the cliche politician is a lawyer from a well known private school who gives preference to friends or friends of friends.
Eliminating money from that scenario reduces the tiny number of companies who currently influence politics and push it closer to 'interesting' or 'popular' issues rather than ones backed by incumbent connections and wealth.
Countries that have limits on pre-election advertising spending generally include any and all public advertising expenses in that - TV, newspapers, online media, billboards, public space, physical mail campaigns, sponsorship of events/teams/whatever, etc. Pre-election ads by other people is limited - small amounts per person are exempted, but you can't simply buy a $10k radio ad praising whatever candidate you like, nor can a radio station do it on their own.
Also, in the pre-election time mass media have to offer equal conditions for all parties - if you own a TV station and run ads for one party for $1/minute, then you have to offer the same ad slots for the same price to all other parties as well.
I mean, it's not simple and it does require some limitations of what the people and media can do - which might conflict with USA 1st amendment, but in general the problem is somewhat solvable, it's somehow done elsewhere and so you can look at worldwide experience to pick out the bits that work best.
>but you can't simply buy a $10k radio ad praising whatever candidate you like
Can I buy a $10k radio ad supporting some particular issue that the candidate also supports?
Can I buy a radio station and hire talk radio hosts that argue in favor of the candidate or issues the candidate supports?
>but in general the problem is somewhat solvable
I think that depends on what you count as "solvable". The systems which address the problem probably work better for some people and less well for others. Which people do you have reason to believe are beneficiaries of these systems, and what reason do you have to believe that?
On one hand, the beneficiaries are the smaller parties, since it allows somewhat effective participation in elections without requiring that much money - they get some free airtime (gov't funds a specific amount of airtime in largest TV & radio stations for election coverage, allocated equally for parties; I'm not sure whether all applicants or all those who got some minimum number of votes in previous elections), and if you have an active volunteer force, you can get your message out without being overwhelmed by a massive campaign of the established parties. This also makes it practical for new parties to get started and get some seats whenever some voter group or key issue gets ignored by the parties in power.
On the other hand, it has some advantages for the established politicians as well, after all they set the rules for this system - in essence it avoids an arms race. Lifting the limits would give them some advantage over the smaller parties and upstarts, but nothing over their real competition, but that would mean that all the major players would suddenly need to raise many times more money, making everyone more dependent on donors.
Who are the losers in this case? Probably the very wealthiest individuals (not "the 1%" but the top 10-100 richest people), since it limits their influence. At any one point of time one or another party (not necessarily the largest one) may have an advantage in financial support and would be happy to lift or raise limits so that they could buy more votes, but if something like that happens, then it motivates everyone else to not let that happen.
Regarding your questions - it depends, that's more a question for the lawyers. IMHO ads supporting some issue would be fine but talk hosts arguing in favor of some (any) candidate would be prohibited in pre-election campaign time window - e.g. all mass media interviews with candidates during that time would be only in the scheduled slots or as advertising. Sure, if you control important media or people then the limits can and do get bent quite a bit beyond their intent, but it still sets a limit. I mean, if the stated limit is 10 then everybody might push it to 11 by various means, but you can't really do a meaningful large scale money-influence campaign without it being obviously illegal.
>Who are the losers in this case? Probably the very wealthiest individuals (not "the 1%" but the top 10-100 richest people), since it limits their influence.
I would guess the opposite is probably true. The top 10-100 likely have very strong influence over the media, either due to just owning media outlets or due to business relationships (e.g. buying advertisements not related to politics). If people without those relationships can't buy advertisements, then the people who influence media in other ways benefit.
>IMHO ads supporting some issue would be fine
So it would be fine for someone to spend a few million on anti-immigrant ads a few days before an election where immigration is a key point of disagreement between the two front-runners?
>Sure, if you control important media or people then the limits can and do get bent quite a bit beyond their intent, but it still sets a limit.
Why exactly is the existence of a limit relevant? People will receive information about the candidates, and many will decide how to vote based on that information. I don't see how it matters whether the information comes from paid advertising or from control over the media. Some individuals will decide what information the masses will see. Those people have enormous influence over the election. I don't see how it matters if they got that influence by paying for it directly or indirectly.
I never really fleshed out the idea too much in my head. It may indeed be impossible to completely get rid of private money. With shit like super-PACs and all the different shell entities that exist solely to funnel money through, all those should be struck from the books. Private donations of $3500 or whatever the limit is? Sure, keep those.
>With shit like super-PACs and all the different shell entities that exist solely to funnel money through, all those should be struck from the books.
In regard to promoting political candidates, what in particular should individuals unaffiliated with the candidate not be allowed to spend their private money on?
For example, should I be allowed to spend my own money to buy a computer which I then use to post comments on message boards which argue in favor of some candidate?
Should I be allowed to spend my own money on a computer which hosts a website which argues in favor of some candidate?
Should I be allowed to buy a newspaper and then selectively hire journalists who I believe are biased in favor of the candidates that I prefer?
I'm a private company (or private billionaire). I like your opponent. I put ads up on TV for them using my money. How can anyone stop me without it being a First Amendment violation?
And while it isn't giving that politician money, there are plenty who will recognize that my paying for their add is giving them a service that is worth money. It isn't quite as direct as donating, but the effect is the same.
>I put ads up on TV for them using my money. How can anyone stop me without it being a First Amendment violation?
How can we even decide whether an ad is for some candidate? If it doesn't mention them by name, but is plainly obviously talking about them, would that still count? What if it's less obvious? What if it doesn't have anything to do with the candidate, but promotes some policy that the candidate also happens to support? All seem to fall under the category of 'giving them a service that is worth money'.
What is the test for reasonable constraints on free speech? And what will be the penalty for breaking the ban? If it is just a fine, you have basically just made it so the rich can pay more to have a stronger voice. If it is jail time... well we already know how well the legal system goes after the rich. A law would benefit those who have the power to break it while harming those weaker.
Reading some of the cases, especially the ones where the court has yet to directly rule otherwise on, are quite chilling in their potential application.
Or do like every sensible country does, cap individual donations, forbid companies from donating, create a government entity whose goal is to ensure donations are respecting those rules, candidates having to deliver their list of donors to said entity. Make it actually illegal to get private money from PACs and other complex setups. And eventually reimburse part of the campaign past a certain percentage of votes.
But that requires to unfuck the entire american political system and weird fascination for corporations being people, so this might take a while.
They're implemented, but the rise of the SuperPAC after Citizens United more or less makes the regulations pointless. I can't contribute more than $2700 to a campaign, but I can contribute $27,000,000 to a PAC that requires only the thinnest imaginable separation from the campaign. Basically, as long as the candidate isn't on TV personally endorsing my check, we're good.
I wasn't suggesting I had one. I'm just pointing out that SuperPACs get around pretty much any meaningful prior attempts at regulating campaign contributions.
I don't think there is an alternative. What is needed in order to solve the problem is a complete overhaul of how campaigns are financed, including making quite a lot of currently protected speech illegal. And that cure may be worse than the disease. Without it though, politicians will continue to require massive quantities of private cash, and I don't see any way to make that not suck for the country as a whole.
What can possibly be done about media outlets, whose owners choose what news gets reported and what slant it takes on so on? The more you restrict the ability of people to pay for advertisements, the more control the media has over what people see.
Like I said, probably nothing can be done that isn't ultimately likely to be worse. Short of people spontaneously becoming smarter, you'd effectively have to outlaw news outlets deemed to be "too slanted", and even if you could do that (you can't), I'm not so naive as to think a government in control of the press would be in any way better.
Basically, it's all fucked, I guess would be my considered opinion. Democracy just doesn't work when half or more of the population can be trivially manipulated into believing anything you want them to believe.
The exact opposite of it: money isn't speech, so restrictions on campaign financing aren't infringements on your free speech rights. Not letting you spend millions on campaign ads is not an equivalent of silencing your political opinion - you can still speak, write etc as a private individual, same as any other citizen.
Can I create a video and post it on my private youtube channel, as a private individual?
Can I spend $10 million creating the youtube video, if I have that much money as a private individual?
Can I organize a group of 10 friends to each spend $1 million on the youtube video?
Can I organize 1 million people to spend $10 each on said video?
Note that under McCain-Feingold (which is the law that was at issue in Citizens United) the answer to the second question is "yes", as far as I can tell: the law instituted restrictions on corporations and unions, not on rich individuals.
Whether the answer is "yes" for the second and third question would have depended on whether youtube counts as "broadcast, cable, or satellite communication" as well as whether a gofundme campaign should fund under the law, and so forth. So it's really not that hard to come up with loopholes around this stuff, if you want to allow spontaneous grassroots production of political youtube videos.
(Also, one person's "political ad" is another person's "documentary", often enough; this goes in both directions.)
>Can I create a video and post it on my private youtube channel, as a private individual?
Yes.
>Can I spend $10 million creating the youtube video, if I have that much money as a private individual?
Yes. However, if it turns out that those ten million were gathered from other friends, explicitly in the goal to make this video without disclosing your donors or ignoring the caps, you should be fined and be made unelectable for multiple years.
>Can I organize a group of 10 friends to each spend $1 million on the youtube video?
Not if that video is part of your campaign, because then the amount each person can donate is capped.
>Can I organize 1 million people to spend $10 each on said video?
Yes.
The only real problem in those four is the third. Because it is infinitely easier to organize only ten friends to donate one million to your campaign than to organize one million people, especially if you're already in the category of people that can afford to blow ten millions like that.
As a bonus, at least having one million people donating to you demonstrates that you actually have people following you.
This was apparently not clear: in all those questions the "I" posting the video is not the person running. That's the context of the Citizens United decision.
Then you are more than welcome to blow as much money as you'd like on your favourite candidate! And since it's on Youtube, noone is "forced" to watch your video, they can always switch to something else.
However, TV and cable channels (as well as press) should have strict equality rules when it comes to candidates for a given period until the elections. What good will your ten million dollars video do on CNN when they are legally obligated to give every candidate the same amount of air time? But of course, you could skirt around it, and make your video subtly hint about said candidate, never mentioning him. But if countries with civil law can manage to make that work when it comes to respecting the spirit of the law, I have no doubt a country with common law will have no issues realizing that this is quite obviously violating the spirit of the law.
There is absolutely no principled difference between youtube and cable channels that I can see; people are easily able to "switch to something else", as you say, in both cases. Or indeed, shut off their TV. Doubly so if we're talking long-form content like that in the Citizens United decision, as opposed to 30-second ad spots.
Why do you think that there is a difference here?
> But if countries with civil law can manage to make that work when it comes to respecting the spirit of the law
For what it's worth, said countries typically have nothing comparable to the constitutional free speech protections the US has, and have no problem with the government imposing all sorts of speech limits that would get laughed out of court in the US.
And as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, speech that is not "for" any particular candidate but "against" a particular candidate is not trivial to apportion in an "equal time" regime.
Most laws have loopholes, just as most software has bugs. You try to anticipate them when you write the law, and you keep an eye on them and amend the law as necessary.
It's not that simple in this case, because for my first question the answer really needs to be "yes" as a clear First Amendment matter: individual political speech is clearly protected, and video is a common "speech" medium nowadays. So that's a "loophole" that is pretty much required by the Constitution.
It's really not clear to me how one can draw a sane line between the first and second question, for this case, unless you want to forbid any political video that actually takes time/effort/money to do research for (see "documentary").
And then the problem becomes that either you privilege the political speech of rich individuals over non-rich ones even more than we already do, or you have to allow non-rich individuals to pool resources to speak.
The "loophole" is then.. what exactly? What form the pooling takes? Whether the pooling is voluntary? Something else? I see a lot of people who are unhappy with the Citizens United decision, but not many proposals for what the law on this should be apart from "political speech from organizations I disagree with should not be allowed". For example, I see lots of "corporations shouldn't be able to engage in political speech" but very little of "unions shouldn't be able to engage in political speech" from Citizens United opponents. Amusingly, I see a fair amount of "unions shouldn't be able to engage in political speech" from people who support the Citizens United decision. And I have met absolutely no one who opposes the Citizens United decision and also thinks Michael Moore shouldn't be allowed to create movies in election years. Though I expect such people do exist; there just aren't many of them.
>corporations shouldn't be able to engage in political speech
Corporations should be able to engage in political speech, as long it is done through their CEO or anyone that represents them officially, who then would be nothing more than just another citizen who happens to own a company, defending its interests. By all means, have an interesting debate, explain your point of view, reason as to why you'd like X or Y.
Money is _not_ speech. By allowing those citizens to contribute financially, in an effectively unlimited way through superPACs and other setups, you are throwing away the very foundation of democracy and equality amongst citizens when it comes to being represented.
>unions shouldn't be able to engage in political speech
Go ahead, same thing, debate! Make yourselves heard, in the streets or on television. But, once again, money can fuck right off.
>you are throwing away the very foundation of democracy and equality amongst citizens when it comes to being represented.
There is no such foundation. You're lying to yourself. At the very least, the owners of media outlets have far more influence than other citizens due to their ability to set the conversation. There is literally nothing you can do to achieve your ridiculous ideal of equality, or to even come anywhere close to it. All you can do is change what rich people have to do to get what they want, and maybe make it more expensive. And by the way, making it more expensive just means the richest get even more of a say.
>money can fuck right off.
So I can't pay someone to build a website that (directly or indirectly) promotes a candidate?
Or maybe your terrible political system has made you jaded and not realize that democracy is still a thing of the people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, whoever owns CNN can use up all his airtime telling you that X is the greatest vandidate that's ever lived and yes, he will reach more people than I ever will. Yet, his vote has the exact same value as mine.
Impose limits, educate people. You'll see that things will improve. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it takes some time. But you can either do that, or slump in your apathy and watch your country descend ever lower into the depth of intelligence and be the butt of everyone's joke even more than it is right now.
>Yes, whoever owns CNN can use up all his airtime telling you that X is the greatest vandidate that's ever lived and yes, he will reach more people than I ever will. Yet, his vote has the exact same value as mine.
Interesting logic. Let's try applying it to the completely obvious parallel:
"Yes, whoever owns boatloads of money can use up all his money buying TV ads telling you that X is the greatest candidate that's ever lived and yes, he will reach more people than I ever will. Yet, his vote has the exact same value as mine."
Nothing goes hand in hand with the first. The first is a failed attempt at rationalizing away the fact that there will always be people that have vastly more influence over politics than others do, and that there is no such thing as equality in politics.
The second paragraph as far as I can tell boils down to "educate people" as the answer. Who should be doing the educating?
I think you just ignored my questions about how the specifics of this work. Again, say the CEO decides to create a video to explain his point of view. Is that a problem? Is it a problem if he pays for production of that video? Is it a problem if he gets several people together to pay for the production of that video? Where do you, personally, draw the line?
Making yourself heard on television commonly takes the form of TV advertising, which is all about money, unfortunately.
>Making yourself heard on television commonly takes the form of TV advertising, which is all about money, unfortunately.
Like I answered in your other post, equality of air time for each candidate. I know, you've had twenty something candidates, and it would be hard to make that work. Tough luck, that's the price to pay for a fairer election.
I don't envy your ridiculous two year long campaigns, but at least you'd get some diversity, unlike your two-candidates-blow-100-million-in-total-and-bombard-you-for-months current way of doing it. And who knows, that might even bring you to reform your woefully outdated political system.
Where "air time" means "time across all possible cable channels", right?
And presumably equality of "youtube time" too? How do you even measure this?
Seriously, we're way past there being 5 broadcast TV networks and nothing else where you could try enforcing some sort of mandate.
Keep in mind that Citizens United wasn't even "for" some particular candidate. It was against a particular candidate and wanted to show its movie at a point in time when it wasn't even clear who the candidate's opponents would be. Assuming you imposed the "equality of air time" doctrine in this situation, who's air time would the movie come out of, exactly?
It's easy to just claim the system is broken; figuring out how to fix it sanely is much harder.
(And for the record, I agree that the current campaign lengths and costs in the US are ridiculous. What I don't see is how to make them less so without imposing some pretty totalitarian speech controls, which would immediately get coopted by those in power to completely shut down anything resembling third party candidates.)
Air time means "you wanna talk about candidate X on your channel? Sure, you're just going to match every single minute you spoke about him with every other candidate.". That usually excludes legal trouble because that doesn't exactly count as campaigning for said candidate. I feel like you are seeing it as having an allotted amount of time for each candidate, where every single minute is counted and taken out of their time counter, when the idea is more to be to allow the channels to organise how they wish, but ultimately, in a 24 hour period, they have to fit the same amount for each candidate. (In practice, you do that over a week or a month, but the concept is the same).
YouTube time is different because there's not one single place controlling your entire feed, noone dictating what you are going to watch. You can decide on your own to watch ten hours of your favourite candidate and ignore every other, because you made that choice and noone imposed it on you.
The Citizens United question is a bit tricky indeed, but two things:
- Ultimately, it is the TV channel's responsibility to have aired such a video, and as such should match any time campaigning for a candidate with others. But, like you said, it was more an attack then anything else. Which brings us to our second point:
- Straight up outlaw such clips that are an attack on a candidate. It serves no purpose other than to drive down the level, it makes the campaign absolutely worthless and is a danger to democracy. It is the most basic level, the dark depth of political life. It kills every debate, destroys every effort made to educate people, because ultimately attacks are cheap, entertaining and efficient. It truly makes society worse as a whole, and people stupid. Yes, that's maybe an attack on free speech. I believe keeping a higher level of debate is a tad more important than being able to take a dump on someone you don't like on live TV.
Let me give you examples of where I live, France, to alleviate some of your fears.
We have a council that ensures what is aired is either nonpartisan, or matched, with the ability to shut down entire TV programs if needed. It has not been done in decades, and most of it ends up being fines. The shitstorm that would happen if they did cancel an show would be quite the sight. Attacks are forbidden. Total campaign funds are capped. Campaign clips are of fixed length, are aired something like four times a day, randomly ordered, shown for all candidates. Public TV has an obligation to give financial and material aid for smaller candidates to ensure they can have a clip. You cannot start officially campaigning on TV and in the press before a set date. You could say we have some rather intensive speech control.
This previous election has seen the two traditional parties (LR & PS) failing miserably. The socialist party, one of the most important parties in the country and previous president's party ended up with a pitiful 6.5% of votes. REM, the new president's movement was born out of nowhere barely a year before the elections. FI managed to crystallize the leftist electorate and reach 19%, barely a percent below the traditional conservative candidate. The FN, as much as I despise them for everything they stand for, is not a traditional party. We have communist candidates. Yes, multiple, because the only thing harder than herding cats is getting communists to agree. We have one that intends to go to Mars. Every election, we have a dozen candidates. Every election, debates are held. They're even rather polite, usually. This year, Fillon has been bogged down in embezzlement affairs, Le Pen too. Aside from one deliciously satisfying bash during one debate, an which lasted 3 minutes over a 3 hour long debate, things stayed civil.
And that's just an example of how we do it here, and I definitely not believe it's perfect. Our political system has issues. Plenty of them. Look at other countries, look at how it's done. Improve on it, and take the best from each.
> because there's not one single place controlling your entire feed
That's true with cable too.
> Straight up outlaw such clips that are an attack on a candidate.
What constitutes an attack? Is a clip pointing out that a candidate is wrong on some matter of fact an attack on that candidate? What about a matter of almost-fact (i.e. one where disagreements exist but the preponderance of the evidence is considered to be on a certain side)? This is a serious question; people disagree vehemently on this very matter. As a concrete example, can one point out that a candidate's policies will likely lead to increased atmospheric CO_2 levels? Can one point out that a candidate has not been trustworthy in the past?
I think pointing out potential problems with candidates is _critical_ to democracy functioning. The _tone_ is a separate matter, of course, and I agree that the tone it's often done in is not good for democracy.
I would really like to understand what you consider an "attack" vs "not an attack" and how those definitions match up with how you'd have to define them sanely for an equal-time regime.
> Let me give you examples of where I live, France, to alleviate some of your fears.
France is pretty bad on freedom-of-speech issues, I know; not just in this area. That doesn't mean the US should follow France's lead down that lane.
> We have a council that ensures what is aired is either nonpartisan
Really? And they do this while ignoring their own political biases, including unconscious ones? I am dubious, but it's possible if there is enough of a tradition of doing so that people would be embarrassed to show even implicit partisanship in this situation.
> Attacks are forbidden
"Attacks" defined how?
> Campaign clips are of fixed length
Defined how? Are Michael Moore movies considered "campaign clips"? Should they be in the US?
Again, I agree that the way US elections work is far from optimal. I've just had a hard time finding things to change that would not cause more harm than good, including starting down some seriously slippery slopes to things we have consciously moved away from in the past (e.g. government control over the content of what can be aired on TV).
You're 100% right. What I'd say is that we as a society have to make a choice between preserving the full range of protected speech we all enjoy and curtailing the degree to which the democratic process has been corrupted by the unlimited need for private money to run a campaign.
I'm not personally convinced I know which of those two options is preferable, but those are the options. I am fairly well convinced that you can't do the latter without the former.
Hardly. Some citizens own media outlets and can hire and fire journalists based on their political leanings. Some citizens pay millions of dollars to media outlets for non-political advertising and can adjust their purchases depending on the reporting of the media outlet. Are you going to tell media outlets they can't talk about politics? Or do you disagree that media outlets have influence over elections (at least, more than I do)? I'd guess they have more influence than paid advertisements.
Consumers of a product are beneficiaries. The general criticism is for state programs, where the people that get the benefit are few, and those who pay taxes cant fight for the few cents taken away from them.
The only meaningful campaign finance reform would require a constitutional amendment, because SCOTUS has said a corporation is a person and persons have free speech and money is free speech therefore corporations can spend any amount of money on behalf of a candidate. So you'd have to rip that up with an amendment. There are two paths to an amendment, via 2/3rds agreement by both houses of Congress, or 2/3rd of the states calling for a consitutional convention (which has never happened). There is no chance such an amendment gets proposed by this or a foreseeable future Congress. Both of the major parties prefer the existing system.
Which leads to the other possible amendment, up ending the monopoly the political parties have on the primary voting system. One way that sounds nice, but is specious, is destroying the political parties - simply disallow their existence. Probably better is to change the voting system:
a. Range or preferential voting in a single election rather than the current tribal primary system which is not controlled by law but by each political party. Primaries encourage members of the tribe to vote in a reactionary way, the extremes of each party tend to win.Range or preferential voting is better than runoffs, it's basically an instant runoff system.
b. Get rid of the Electoral College. The idea it will keep us from getting incompetent presidents is pretty much proven wrong, plus it's been broken again by the two political parties who have gotten states to enact laws that require electors explicitly to not vote their conscience, under penalty. So it doesn't at all do what it was designed to do; and it comes from our racist slave history, the southern slave states wouldn't ratify the constitution without this provision. So get rid of it. The only thing worse than tyranny of the majority is tyranny of the minority.
Anyway, it's not going to fix itself. People will have to want to fix it.
If the explanation is some fundamental law of economics/politics as you seem to be suggesting, what is the reason the USA is afflicted more by the problem than other first world nations, or than the USA of a century ago?
The U.S. political system is remarkably vulnerable to pressure from interest groups because power is so fragmented. We have three branches of government at the federal level, with a bicameral legislature, and 50 individual states, each with three branches of government and plethora of local governments. And you need them all on board to do anything big.
Imagine that you are the Sierra Club and you want to block construction of a new highway. You can lobby:
* The President, who signs the appropriations bill
* EPA, Department of Transportation, and any other three-letter federal agency that gets to weigh in on the project
* Congressmen and Senators of affected regions/states, and remember that Senators can filibuster legislation to make it require a super-majority
* State governors
* State legislators
* Local governments whose land the road will pass through
* Indian tribes, if their land is affected
And if above doesn't work, you can sue in federal/state court.
All that adds to the time and cost of a construction project, assuming that it will be even approved. And once its approved? You still have a million ways to delay/obstruct the project through lawsuits and lobbying the bureaucratic process.
That's why there are no 'shovel ready' projects. We'll never be able to build another Hoover Dam or the Interstate Highway system.
Obviously other countries have division of power too. But the effect is much less pronounced.
EDIT: As for why the U.S. of a century ago wasn't as paralyzed, well, that's partly because of the growth of the administrative state (bureaucracy), growing importance of interest groups as sources of campaign funds, more regulations in general (which makes lawsuits possible), and fragmentation of party discipline.
I don't believe the Hoover Dam should be replicated. It's a marvel of engineering but I'm opposed to damming any rivers.
Damming our rivers like that has had such terrible and unforeseen environmental and economic consequences that I can only hope we un-dam wherever possible.
There's a trade off. I'll take a dam that disrupts a local river ecosystem to coal fired power plants that throw millions of tons of CO2 and other hazardous material into the air impacting a much larger area. In the case of the Hoover Dam it's roughly 4 coal plants to produce the same power generation capacity.
Depending on how long the river has been dammed up, tearing it down can have reverse ecological consequences now. It only takes about a decade for the downstream to adapt to the limited water flow (or the alternative interpretation is everything dies off within a decade) but after that to reintroduce the full flow would destroy new life that has settled the new environment produced.
This is a feature of democracy. The solution is not campaign finance reform, it is reform of democracy itself. Place additional separation between the people/corporations and the purse-strings of the treasury, and you will reduce this problem. Alternatively, you can take power & responsibility away from the government so that market forces come to bear upon the issue.
Democracy is, after all, a system in which a determined voting majority can use the hammer of the state to extract wealth from the rest of the population. Many people vote in self-defense.
I know that arguing for smaller government and less democracy is an unpopular position, but it is the only way to achieve long-term success. The areas of the economy with the most government involvement and regulation are where we find costs ballooning out of control: healthcare, prisons, infrastructure, student loans, military. Continuing on the present course is not sustainable.
> The areas of the economy with the most government involvement and regulation are where we find costs ballooning out of control: healthcare, prisons, infrastructure, student loans
Come on. Really? Healthcare is heavily regulated, yes, but a lot of that comes from regulating a fucked up mix between public and private institutions along with insurance companies thrown in the mix. Single-payer would absolutely lower these costs substantially. That's the opposite of less regulation.
And prisons? We have private prisons...as in, corporations that have a financial incentive to put more people in prison. Not just that, they lobby the government to create more laws or have stricter penalties to keep more people in prison. You can't seriously tell me that's too much regulation.
Infrastructure? Absolutely needs to be government run. Private companies have no incentive here, unless heavily subsidized by the government, in which case they would just balloon costs as much as possible in order to squeeze as much blood from the stone as they could.
Student loans...if a dog put on a pair of glasses it could get a student loan. That's a lack of regulation. The only real regulation making it balloon out of control is that bankruptcy doesn't absolve your loan debt (whether it should or shouldn't, that's another issue).
Military, I agree with you on! Less military spending! We can use the money for (public) schools and make sure our country isn't made up of complete imbeciles in 20 years.
This problem still occurs in countries that are far more stringent in their fundraising and campaign spending regulations. While I wouldn't say that campaign finance reform is a bad thing, it doesn't really fix this problem.
The US has the most money in politics per capita in the western world, and yet, given how much a company can get per dollar spent, lobbying and donations are an absolute bargain. Handing money to a politician directly is very effective, but in practice, even a lobbying group that didn't spend a dime in elections would still be worthwhile for industry groups.
The dynamics of collective action don't even need government to be true: You see the same behaviors in large corporations, where departments can cause a lot of overall damage to a company by causing small inefficiencies to everyone else: Not enough to organize against. Having worked in government and in big enterprise, if anything government is better, as the lobbying and the cajoling is far more visible.
The solution to the general inefficiency problem in infrastructure in other countries is, against what you would think, is to align goals empowering government vs contractors. The places where we have more inefficiencies is where we are trading not money fork work, but knowledge for expertise: The more layers of expertise we borrow, the harder a contractor is to replace, and thus the higher the final markup.
There's a great study on this regarding the Madrid subway. The subway authority has a budget, and in practice it will go up if they have more ridership. It's in their very best interest to have a large, high quality network, so to keep costs down, they do most of the planning themselves, have a lot of the engineering in house, and most of what they farm out is basic construction and drilling: They'll go as far as to give different contractors different sections to drill, because different sections of tunnel are easier to handle with different techniques and machinery. It's not as if Spain doesn't have insane infrastructure inefficiencies overall, but in this case there's enough goal alignment, and enough decision making outside of the political arena, that they save an order of magnitude per kilometer and per station than the US equivalent, while typical highway construction, decided at the political level and handed to big contractors, aren't really any cheaper.
In software terms, it's the difference between handing the work to a small startup that lives and dies by its runway, or handing a project to big software contractors, healthcare.gov style: The big project handed to the big contractor will very rarely work right, and it will be incredibly expensive.
For example, if a big irrigation project will force taxpayers to subsidise corporate farms, the corporations have a big incentive to spend on ads and campaign contributions. Or if you have to give $60 to a private company for tax filing software, they have a big incentive to lobby and make campaign contributions to keep the tax system complicated.
I'm sure construction projects are subject to the same pro-waste incentives.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is - campaign finance reform, perhaps?