THREE BILLION AND COUNTING

It's the year 2000, and America is celebrating with the most expensive elections anywhere, ever. Estimates now peg the cost of the upcoming national contests at $3,000,000,000. My guess is that by the time we're done it'll be closer to four, but either way it's a record and some say offensive amount of money that's currently coursing through our political system.

This is not automatically a bad thing. Three billion dollars buys a lot of free speech, certainly enough to look at complicated issues in a serious way. Luckily for both major parties, the American people are not presently inclined to do so. Overloaded with information and exhausted by the demands of unrelenting prosperity, we've come to prefer sentiment over substance in our politics, reserving whatever passion we have left for nonsense non-issues like same-sex marriage and the Confederate flag.

And so the ad campaigns are rolling out, with more than a billion earmarked just to sell us Al Gore and George W. Bush. It's safe to conjecture that never before in human history will so much have been spent by so few to say so little.

Yet in terms of what's at stake - - control of the political apparatus that controls the trillion-dollar-a-year federal budget - - 3/10ths of 1% is an impressively low cost of doing business. The Pentagon alone spends twice that amount every eight days. It's an even smaller fraction of the $4 trillion National Debt, which is why Donald Trump's long-forgotten proposal of a debt payoff tax on the super-wealthy was so fanciful. The super-wealthy will never acquiesce to such an arrangement when they can purchase the entire electoral process for a few billion every four years.

For those like Ralph Nader who argue that the rising tide of big money flooding into politics is drowning out the voice of average Americans, elections with multi-billion dollar price tags are blatantly antidemocratic. But in our present Age of Economics where net worth is widely regarded as a sign of enlightenment, maybe we should just be thankful that someone is willing to pick up the tab. There are plenty of countries where the super-wealthy are too impatient to go through the hassle of buying elections, preferring the speed and simplicity of military coups, death squads, and the like. At least the American corporate oligarchy remains committed, via record levels of funding, to sustaining this most cherished of national illusions.

In return, we can expect to see more legislation like the recently passed repeal of the estate tax, granting America's elite a tax cut twenty times larger than a lifetime of soft money donations while preserving their heirs' undiminished financial and political influence for generations to come.

President Clinton vetoed the repeal, but does anyone doubt that a President George W. Bush will sign it? And once he does, further empowering the powerful, can Steve Forbes' beloved flat-tax be far behind? It's the same argument: that those competent and dedicated enough to produce wealth deserve to keep it, because they know best what to do with it. Yet Forbes' own quest for the presidency, where he spent $70 million for a handful of convention delegates, seems to suggest that the rich sometimes have no clue what to do with the money. It could also be seen as one more reason to retain some form of estate tax, since without it Mr. Forbes would have had twice as much of his father's hard-earned cash tempting him toward greatness.

The truth is that it's as useless to rail against the influence of money in politics as it is to rail against its influence anywhere else, maybe moreso. Even if those whose campaigns receive the largesse should inexplicably decide to legislate real reform, the issue could be moot, with the Supreme Court likely to strike down mandatory spending restrictions for the same reason it's rejected flag burning bans - - as an unconstitutional limit on political speech.

Still, there may be one last hope to get some kind of control over the cost of future elections. I suggest it's time to get the EPA involved. Surely the quadrennial dumping of four billion dollars worth of political hot air can be shown to have an environmental impact. Democrats could decry the effect on global warming. Republicans could counter with an amendment banning flag-related emissions as well, sealing the compromise.

It's an admittedly absurd scenario, but one with a better chance of cleaning up the contaminated atmosphere surrounding American politics than our present course of (in)action.

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