Fourteen billion dollars has been spent on the 2020 elections so far, and the runoff elections are still going on in Georgia. What’s up with that? Does it really cost fourteen billion dollars for us to be able to choose responsibly among the candidates? Is that the best way we could be spending our money (our being used in a very loose sense in this context). Who benefits from that much spending? Campaign people getting paychecks. Consultants. Media. I suspect it’s a fairly narrow slice of our economy that benefits.
Spending fourteen billion dollars ($14,000,000,000) on an election seems like such senseless churn. Is there some other way we could run an election so fourteen billion dollars changing hands would provide more benefit to more people? I guess the best we could hope for though is that elections could just cost less, and the people that donated to elections could do something more constructive with that money instead.
The stress of the pandemic has us thinking about all the people forced out of work. Small businesses with no reserves forced to close. Impending mass homelessness as a wave of evictions looms. Working families hungry. A generation of disadvantaged students driven to remote learning but without the resources to access online classes. As a hopeless flaming liberal, I’m thinking we’re all in this together, government has a part to play, and we should all be helping each other out. I guess even if we spent less on elections though, it wouldn’t mean we’d spend more helping each other in a time of need. One wouldn’t necessarily lead to the other. I know; make campaigns simpler and less costly. Let the campaign people, that then had less to do, run campaigns to help people through the covid crisis, and other crises as they come along. Run small dollar campaigns where people, like we who contributed to political campaigns, can voluntarily make recurring contributions in favor of specific causes instead; massive campaigns generating millions and billions to provide shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry, educational resources, job training; ways to help people who want to improve their lives invest in themselves. Every vote counts. Every person counts too.
