Why not take all the billions being sunk into election campaigns and use it to pay down the national debt?

The only way that can happen is if you don't have elections, i.e. if you have a monarch or a dictator. In your argument, having elections themselves is a waste of money and time. I guess you can make a good argument because most of the time when you go to elect somebody, you are choosing between the lesser of 2 evils. In a dictatorship, you don't have a choice, but if you are lucky and your dictator is a really good administrator, then your country is far better off, because less resources are spent on elections.

I couldn't agree more. Our country is never going to be "for the people" again until we have public financing of elections. Each candidate gets the same amount of money--let's say $1 million--and a certain amount of free air time (after all, the airwaves belong "to the people" supposedly) and that's it. No corporate donations, no PACs, no other money whatsoever. This would keep corporations from running our country, free office holders from constant fundraising so they could attend to legislating, shorten campaigns to a reasonable six weeks or so, and free up the hundreds of millions that are now being spent on campaigns so it could go to something more important and more productive.

Those dollars being spent are helping out local economies where the candidates are campaigning. It's not like those campaign dollars are being personally pocketed by the candidates.

It's not a candidate's job to pay down the national debt. That is done with taxpayer's money. Campaign money is (mostly) from donors.

You do realize that in a capitalistic society, the government does not arbitrarily take away profits to pay off debts IT accumulated. Unless you are advocating the nationalization of the oil industry, that would be illegal. And based on government history, if we were to nationalize the oil industry, they would just find some new way to spend their profits. So either way, it wouldn't work. Edit: Well, please enlighten me, because your question is totally unintelligible as it is currently written.

My, what a sensible idea.. you can bet we will never use it here in america.. besides.. we like, or at least our candidates do... the show biz of it all.. no one seems to care about the billions spent on campaigns only to get into office and tell us there is no money to fix things.. and well.. we will have to raise your taxes.

It's all a very cruel game, and one that will come crashing down onus one day... even Rome fell.. and so will we.

Great idea,let's start with limiting campaigning to two months.