United States | News & Politics

Then you'll just have wealthy candidates who can afford to lavishly pay for their own campaigns.

For instance, Rick Scott famously claimed he was using his own money when he ran for governor of Florida, but once he was in, he started manipulating legislation to enrich himself.

For instance he immediately cancelled plans for a high speed tail system that had bi-partisan support, and was paid for by the private sector. It wouldn't cost the state a thing for 10 years. Scott never mentioned it during his campaign, or he would have lost a lot of votes, and perhaps the election (no he wouldn't, Florida elections are fully rigged these days).

So he cancelled the popular, privately financed HIGH SPEED rail plans, and replaced them with a standard localized commuter rail system, in which he holds a 3% ownership stake. His personal net worth doubled as governor, so funding his own campaign was good investment. He got it all back, and more.

That's how Convicted Criminal Fraudster Rick Scott operates. He recently made the TikTok rounds, with a fiery speech about how Democrats want to keep people from making money. The speech was defending his ability to do Insider Trading as a member of the Senate, something that would send any other American citizen to jail for YEARS. But he's indignant because the Dems want to keep "people" (him) from making (illegal for anyone else) money.

That's the problem with trying to keep ALL money out. Even volunteers cost money, for t-shirts, lanyards, printed campaign materials, coffee, donuts, bottled water for long summer campaign days, transportation, etc.

The government can give campaigns a token amount to cover basic costs for QUALIFIED candidates. What qualifies? That's where we can reconfigure our system so that only real candidates go through, and it filters out clowns like Trump. Political campaign speech should be tightly regulated for truth, and out and out lies (they're eating the pets) as well as violent speech against others (Lock Her Up!) should get a candidate kicked off the campaign, forever.