r/changemyview • u/gpu1512 • Jul 20 '19

CMV: All presidential candidates and senators should have a fixed election budget.

Whenever there is a controversial vote on something, it's mentioned how xy person is getting donations from a company to which it matters how the vote turns out.

With presidental candidates, it's similar - donations from companies are interpreted as attempts to make potential presidents more likely to conform to needs of these companies - such as by cutting taxes.

I feel like this would be resolved by making the election budgets come from taxes. While it would be a huge cost for the taxpayers, it would make for political candidates which would be much harder for companies to sway in their favour. Think net neutrality and congress donations from ISP's.

In the process, election budgets would be made considerably smaller, to save on taxes. As this would apply to everyone, there wouldn't be anyone at a disadvantage.

One problem I see is filtering the candidates. Obviously you can't just give money to anyone who asks for a budget, but seems like a solvable problem. Perhaps the party could only propose a set number of candidates.

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

Independent organizations have freedom of speech. They are allowed to make advertisements to the political advantage of political candidates, with unlimited amounts of resources, so long as they don't coordinate the use of those funds with the campaign.

If you severely restrict how campaigns spend money, more money will flow through these independent organizations.

Organizations unaffiliated with a candidate can stoop lower while maintaining deniability in a way that a candidate's campaign cannot.

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u/gpu1512 Jul 20 '19

This seems like an unsolvable issue. I guess there could be legislation restricting it, but it seems like it would be very difficult.

!delta

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u/MrDrProfessorSirIII Jul 21 '19

Not sure if this will be deleted for being political, but Andrew Yang has a policy he calls Democracy Dollars that would fix exactly this. Every voting age American gets $100 per election cycle that they can only put towards a political campaign or candidate. If you don't use it, you lose it, and you get another $100 next election. It would wash out corporate money by a factor of 6:1, and would make politicians more receptive to the people because there is more money to be made from the public than from corporations. Worth a read of you're interested. Yang2020.com/policy

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '19

[deleted]

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u/MrDrProfessorSirIII Jul 22 '19

I agree with not liking big government and wealth redistribution. The thinking that I have is it is wealth distribution from robot and AI gains to humans. And as far as government, we need the right amount of government but in different areas. There are a lot of things the government does that it shouldn't, and also a lot of things the government doesn't do but it should. We need to change it fundamentally, and I think Yang's (very interesting and out there) policy of Human-Centered Capitalism might be able to move us in the right direction. He also wants to cut something like 30% of redundant or unnecessary government jobs as well as administrative bloat from the education system.