2012 US General Election Discussions: Start to Finish

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by chefhmboyrd

what if....


all the money spent on these campaigns was applied to the National Debt?

Wouldn't make a dent. Wouldn't even really show up. The national debt is at 14 trillion dollars, combined the campaigns are going to spend ~two billion all told. That's .007 (1/7000th) of the national debt. To put it in perspective, over the course of a year if you made, say, 50K last year it would amount to $7.15. Sure, on any given day 7.15 might be the difference between buying lunch out or eating something you took from home or it might be two extra gallons of gas in the car but over the course of the year, that works out to about $.60 a day. Do you notice $.60 a day? Probably not.

If we're going to actually make headway against the debt then we're going to have to do something about military spending (the 1000 pound gorilla in the budgetary room). Almost anything else we do, outside of simply eliminating Social Security and Medicare, would be like trying to scoop out the Pacific ocean with a Dixie cup.

Ironically, the investment we could make that would actually help the deficit go down eventually, is one of the things that there is very little public support for; public financing of political campaigns.

Cheers
Aj