The 2 Billion Dollar Election

It's being widely reported that the total cost for the 2012 elections being held throughout the US will exceed 2 billion dollars. This number represents all State and national races and includes money spent by corporate PACs and individual campaigns.

This is a staggering amount of money and one has to wonder if it's it worth in the long run. Do we really learn anything about the people running for office? It sems that most of the money is spent on negative and misleading ads that do nothing to inform the voting public about what the candidate stands for. In fact most of the ads I have been subjected to this year have been aimed towards making the opponent look incompetent, shifty, unpatriotic, and downright stupid.

Of course much of this is our own fault. We have become a nation in large part that simply does not care about politics. We think that all candidates are the same, and that we really have no choice but to vote based on what little we know about the various candidates thereby making it a choice based on party lines and not by the character of the individual.