Kudos to New Mexico In Depth’s Sandra Fish for uncovering an inconvenient truth about lobbying at the Roundhouse.
Fish’s research found that Common Cause of New Mexico “spent the most overall during the [2015] session: $86,462 on an advertising and phone campaign to encourage lawmakers to pass a series of campaign finance and lobbying transparency bills.” The University of New Mexico landed in a distant second place, with $28,311 spent on “various receptions and other entertainment.”
When the deepest-pocketed “special interest” lobbying state lawmakers is pushing to rein in “money in politics” … well, it’s time for a little soul-searching for New Mexico’s McCainiacs.
I’m not surprised at who is spending the money to scare us into thinking there’s too much money in politics. But to take one example, $5.3 billion was spent on the recent presidential election. A recent annual GDP figure for the U.S. economy is $17.7 TRILLION. I (Excel, actually) did the math: the election for the most powerful and important position in the world cost us 0.00031 of our GDP for one year. That’s 0.03%. It actually rounds to zero if carried to the one-tenth of a percent place. Similar calculations could be done for all the less important elections, and would yield similar results relative to their respective economies. Not a lot of money, and guess what? None of this costs you or me a dime, unless we choose to donate.
I agree totally with Dallas Pottinger’s comment except for a minor correction: since the President runs for a four-year term, campaign expenditures should be compared with GDP for four years, not one year; i.e., $5.3 billion versus $70.8 trillion. The government has pretty much seized control of our economy, or at least tries to, yet in our efforts to try to get the choice of President right, we spend less than 0.01% of what the government’s CEO (tries to) control. That’s less than 1 penny out of every $100 dollars. Any corporate CEO who spent so little on advertising would probably be quickly fired.