Hi. I'm Paul Nixon, a designer living in Mountain View California. My days (and some nights) are spent designing websites for a little company in Cupertino. The rest of my time is spent with my beautiful wife and friends, road cycing and reading your blogs.

$4 Billion.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004 12: 30 PM

$4 billion. Four. Billion. Dollars.

That is the amount of money being spent on political campaigning this year. $1.2 billion alone for the presidential campaigns.

The whole world of money and politics is completely broken. It's insane. It's surreal. Part of me wishes I could sit down with these politicians and confront them on what that money could be doing for this country, instead of feeding their fruitless battles on television with lame-ass ads that scare seniors and only make me think that these politicians are idiots.

This much I know -- if the system has no limits on what they can spend, then they will spend as much as they have. These politicians are like teenages shopping at the mall with dad's credit card. No restraints. No limits.

So something should be done and as an uneducated observer in this area here is what I propose:

Presidential campaigns should have spending caps.

All campaigns for that matter should have spending caps.

It is simply out of control and billions of dollars are going to waste...waste...pure and simple. With spending caps, once each party has determined their candidate, they should be allowed to spend up to a certain amount on their campaign (say $150 million dollars $100 in a presidential campaign) and that's it. If there were across the board spending caps on political campaigns, I think it would greatly help even the playing field for people entering politics. So often these days it's not who has the best ideas, but rather the fattest pocket book that wins elections.

It's hurting this country and it's wasting a hell of a lot of money that should actually go to doing some good...too bad these politicians don't have the integrity to admit that.

UPDATE: It's obvious I know nothing about this stuff and discussing campaign finance reform is completely out of my realm of expertise, but venting about it feels good. After some cursory glancing around here are a couple more links from OpenSecrets.org that seem to break it down a bit: