Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
Nobody said an incumbent President shouldn't have his Secret Service detail with him. What I'm saying is WHY do the taxpayers have to pay for it when he's campaigning? He raised a billion dollars to run for President...let the money for AirForce One, his staff, his Secret Service contingency, advance teams, etc. come from the campaign funds when he is on the campaign trail. The same for any other candidate. Romney, for instance should have to pay for all of his own travel and security as well from his campaign funds. The U.S. govt. shouldn't be footing the bill for that from the taxpayers pocket.
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I am fine with that as long as all candidates are required to have the same level of security. If you require the President to have X Millions of dollars in security expenses for Airforce1 etc, you'd have to require Romney to have the same expense. Otherwise you are making the incumbent spend more on administrative costs and giving an advantage to challengers. That's the quick fix....
The real solution is publicly funded elections and ZERO campaign contributions. Each candidate gets X amount of television time, Y amount of flight time and public venue time etc and campaigns can not start before a specific date. Doing that would fix the problems created by Citizens United, take care of the travel cost issues you raised and provide fair elections with a tiny fraction of the money now wasted on them. Imagine if both candidates had a 100 million dollar campaign budget publicly financed. All the billions of dollars they now collect would never go into the political system, would not corrupt candidates, and would end up utilized elsewhere actually doing some good instead.