Op-Ed: Politics is flooded with cash. Divert more of it to young campaign workers.
There are two main reasons behind the flood of PAC money in politics in this era.
The first is that, in the last two election cycles, the total amount of money contributed by the three major political parties in a single election has reached record levels. The second is that, at the same time, spending in politics continues to dwindle in terms of time, effort, and resources spent in campaigns.
The PAC money and the declining spending are connected, but both are related. So, what are the best ways to stop the money and get the money to the people that need it?
The primary answer is simply to find more money to donate to campaigns, with the goal of giving the people candidates they can trust.
As a politician, I don’t make a ton of money, but I make enough to pay for basic expenses, and I invest my own money in my campaign for a year. I am, as far as I know, the only politician who does this.
For my first 20 years of politics, my only funding was what I was able to raise on the doorsteps, through small donations. Those donations, while less than $300, came from friends, from people I worked with, from people who had an affinity for my work, from people who liked my ideas about politics and my personality.
I was, for a long time, able to get by with what people would contribute to the causes I was interested in.
Then, in the past few years, I saw more and more people want to get involved in politics through PACs, where they can contribute more to campaigns or spend more time fundraising. This is great, but I was, for a long time, able to get by with what people would contribute to causes I was interested in.
This changed in 2014, when I saw how the political world was changing. The amount of money I was seeing in politics through PACs was rising like mad. I started to wonder: Why can’t we do that to politics? Why is it that the three major political parties are able to raise the kind of money that the PACs can raise, but the amount of money they are able to throw at the campaigns is just not nearly up there?
To find me some answers, I reached out to a friend of mine – Paul Soglin, who teaches
