Political spending is continuously being attacked and calls for campaign finance reform to grow louder by the year.
In reality, a limit on money in politics just limits speech and allows the people who control the majority of the money to control the message.
The hypocrisy in political spending reforms is perfectly exposed when compared to the amount of money Americans spend on Christmas each year.
According to Dan Backer writing in Florida Politics:
According to Gallup, consumers plan to spend an average of $942 on Christmas gifts this year — up from $885 million in 2018. All in all, holiday retail sales are set to surpass $1 trillion, with online spending on an unprecedented track.
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However, if that same money was spent on political advertisements, there would be outrage! Christmas carols would turn into shrill screams for “campaign finance reform.” After all, as Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders recently put it, “Billionaires able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates that represent the wealthy and powerful [is] not democracy.”
In truth, political spending pales in comparison to the holiday spurge: Election 2016’s final price tag — the largest in U.S. history — was less than $7 billion for all federal elections (and an estimated $1 billion is double-counted). Election 2018 set a new midterm record, but came in under $6 billion.
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In reality, neither form of advertising should trigger anything other than turning the channel or scrolling down the page. But rogue bureaucrats like Weintraub don’t trust Americans to process information for themselves and make decisions accordingly — to vote “properly” (e.g., vote Democrat). Therefore, it is up to Weintraub and other Democrats who buy into this un-American thinking to regulate political speech because Americans are simply too stupid or too naive to think for themselves.
Consumers of good and politics should be able to filter out the information received and make a decision one way or the other. Bureaucrats should not make this decision for us.
