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 What would I do with $2,000,000 of Campaign Contributions       6 Feb 10

So I have this vision that one day I'll be this big political big wig.  So I started to think -- If I were this big political big wig I'd probably end up with this huge campaign fund chest, and I wondered, how would I spend it?  Since I'm not a big political big wig and really have never associated with any, I had to create my fantasy spending plan based on my constituent observations.  

When I was in elementary school I was chosen to be the schools representative to make a phone call to Congressman Jack Kemp and ask about a bill that was interesting to our Social Studies class.  Not  only did I briefly get to talk with Rep Kemp but shortly afterward I received a package from his office with a nice letter and a copy of the bill.  This experience established the baseline for my expectation of how political leaders should react to the issues of "the People" .  I have no idea if the staffs of today's representatives are smaller, or if the fact that the population has grown while the number of representatives have remained the same. Perhaps a bigger percentage of people take time out to contact elected officials.  It's even possible my grade school experience with Rep Kemp was an anomaly even for him (though I decided a long time ago not to give that possibility much consideration).  Whatever the reason representatives at all levels seem not to meet my expectation of responsiveness.  I think that disappointment guided me on my imaginary spending spree.  

I began to wonder how big of a staff the government provides for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives?  Obviously, its not big enough if so much correspondence goes without being addressed except for maybe a form or automatic response.  So I began to wonder how far could $2,000,000 go in supplementing the work of the normal staff in providing service to the constituency.  I imagine most people that write or communicate in some manner to their representative have issues similar to many other people within that same constituency.  Therefore, most of the time a staff member would only need to do a limited amount of well defined tasks.  They should be familiar with what issues have been tackled before, evaluate which of those issues the current letter addresses and then relay the solution to the person who generated the request.  I'd also want my staffer to catalog the current issue and be prepared for follow on questions or clarifying details.  I would guess in this area a yearly salary of $40,000 could entice dedicated and capable people to agree to work in that environment.  Given an employer has additional cost than just the salary the worker receives, I think I should plan on spending $60,000 a year per additional staffer for  salary related costs.  I have to believe ten additional full time workers should be able to organize and respond to those that reach out to an elected official.  A staff like this would cost about $1,200,000 over the two year term of a congressman.  Add $200,000 for office space and supplies and I would still have $600,000 to buy commercials and pay for the fund raisers so I could earn the $2,000,000 campaign fund for the next two year term.   This all seems like an extensive amount of money for all these projects.  If the representative were dedicated to his constituency there is no excuse for a person with this kind of resources not to be able to figure out how to respond to an inquiry.  

I think my favoring this kind of allocation of resources versus the more common actual allocation, gives me an opportunity to point out one of my fundamental disappointments with the American business environment.   I am not intimately knowledgeable how any elected official spends their campaign funds so its possible one or even most could be spending the majority of their re-election funds providing a service in support of their constituency.  However, I suspect most re-election funds are spent either on traditional advertising, set up cost for candidate quick hit personal appearances, and raising more money.  As you can tell from the way I would like to spend my mythical money I wish the American businesses model would change the ratio of funds spent on product upgrades  as compared to how much they spend on advertisements.  In my opinion, too many companies rely too heavily on advertising to try to make the American public believe their product is good when a better choice for the country would be if the company actually produced a better product.  Right now in our current system the sneaker company that sinks their money into the biggest star to endorse their product holds a distinct advantage over companies that invests their money into hiring a better engineer to improve the wear ability and quality of their product.  In our current system, we value hype over usefulness.  Like my example of the congressional campaign funds points out, I think a better system would be to have a product or a Representative gain a positive reputation and increased popularity because of a reputation earned via hard work.  I'd like to see a representative earn the reputation and have it spread naturally by word of mouth.  Currently fake positive reputations can be worn by a charlatan enabling them to crowd out better and useful products.  One reason our business environment sends us inferior goods when better goods exist lies in the way we constructed our tax system to favor the advertising aspect of a business over the production aspect of a business.  As far as I can tell through an internet search, there is no sales tax on television commercials and an income tax deduction for money spent producing the advertisement.  This tax scheme promotes exactly the opposite type of funding choices I believe are best for the country.  When the government chooses to tax the labor and production of an item but then allows an item to be marketed tax free companies would naturally decide to invest more in hyping then they would manufacturing the product.  It would be great if we could switch around the tax burden to convince companies to make better stuff.  This same logic works in my campaign fund distribution example as well.  Right now campaign committees air an annoying amount of commercials all devoid of any useful content.  They spend almost no money on service to the community.

Service to the community.  Earlier I suggested if I had $2,000,000 in campaign funds I would like to spend a large portion of that money answering constituent mail and hope word of mouth advertising kept me in office.  I've not seen any law prohibiting it, but I think I know enough of how the system works to expect perhaps there is at least a 50% chance there is a rule against intermingling campaign funds in order to keep an official office running.  But don't let my unfamiliarity of the nuances of the tax code let that cloud your understanding of the concept.  If campaign funds can't be used to set up a bigger office, a candidate could still have his campaign office provide useful service to his constituency.  For instance, that staff could be used to generate material meant to educate the constituency.  A good medium for that service is a candidates web page.  I've yet to see any candidate web page that delves into issues as extensively as I would like to see.  Web sites seem to include the same top level and often misleading information as TV commercials with the additional annoyance of continual opportunities for you to contribute.  This even included the Presidential candidate in the last election.  I will say I was pleasantly surprised when I went onto my local congressman's website last week.  On his website there was a link to both the Democrat and Republican Healthcare plans.  This is a good start but this level of information is what I would expect from someone with no campaign re-election funds.  There will be some constituents that will have both the time and the background to read and understand the legalize of the bills in their legal format.  But realistically there will not be very many of those people.  I believe there is a large number of people that can understand and do desire an in-depth analysis and presentation of the proposals.  There are a couple of different formats that could be used for these presentations.  An example of a in-depth analysis you might be familiar with is the drivers test manual the licensing bureau gives you when you decide to apply for or renew your license.  That pamphlet is based on the laws enacted concerning how people are licensed.  Thankfully when people decide to get a license they are not required to read the law and interpret what the words of the code tell them what to do.  Someone has broken it down to English for us.  

Another useful product might be a English conversion of relevant sections.  For those campaigns with large budgets they could do a compare and contrast of the proposals with the most backing.  I've only read the first 30 pages or so of the 216 page Republican proposal.  I haven't read any of the 2000+ democratic proposal.  As an example of what I would like to see in a campaign produced document might be:

Of course, I desire the information presented to be accurate.  I wrote the information above without extensively studying the proposal and without doing any research on risk pools.  The accuracy of the analysis above may be faulty.  Hopefully, you can see the usefulness of providing the electorate with information with at least this much detail.  What would make it even more useful is if it went on to compare this approach with the approach the 2000+ page alternate proposal wants to take to achieve the same goal. 

If I had $2,000,000 in campaign funds I would use a lot of it to provide a service to my constituency.