In for the penny, not for the pound: Why we need campaign finance reform

| Contributing Reporter

Last month, our Congress passed a bill with significant ramifications for the future of our country, and almost no one has heard of it. In order to understand what it does, we need to go back a few years to the big bank bailout. A key reason banks were failing was that they were making increasingly risky maneuvers with their customers’ money. Eventually, their speculations failed, and they fell under. When the U.S. government agreed to bail them out, one of the stipulations was that, in the future, the banks would not be eligible for bailouts if they engaged in the same practices.

The recent bill repealed this stipulation, effectively returning policy to what it was before the recession. Banks can once again make risky speculations, safe in the knowledge that the U.S. government would help them if they ever found themselves in hot water.

This bill was quietly passed, receiving large support from both parties. Whatever ideological differences Republicans and Democrats seem to have, they can apparently agree on this, and it reveals a troubling trend in our country’s politics.

In this day and age, politics is all about exposure. The candidate who can get their message out in the most friendly and appealing way will generally win the election. What this translates to on paper is money. Aspiring politicians require much more money than they can raise on their own. And so they spend a significant amount of time raising money instead of spending time on more pressing matters.

Even more troubling is that we are left with a skewed system in which the debts that politicians make when they enter office prevent them from best serving the people who got them there. This is not a new problem; politicians have rewarded those who helped get them into office for as long as we have been a country. But we have never experienced this phenomenon on such a scale before. Since the televised Kennedy-Nixon debate (and, arguably, since the advent of the radio), politicians have been forced to spend more and more money to gain office.

Campaign finance reform has been an on-and-off issue for decades, and the government puts very strict limits on how much an individual or organization can contribute to a candidate or campaign. The issue is that there are several prominent loopholes that were designed to be exploited and allow certain groups to give far more money than they otherwise legally could. For example, organizations can donate to super political action committees, which do not have the same limits. Furthermore, donating to nonprofit groups allows contributors to remain anonymous, clouding the source of funds.

It’s an arms race, of a sort: each candidate needs to raise more money than the other, and each election, more money is required. Thus, politicians further entangle themselves in a web of sponsors and become less and less able to maneuver and pursue the agenda for which they were elected. It’s time we took another look at how our politicians are elected. We have some changes to make.

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