The problem of too much money in the political system shows its face in numerous ways.
We all rightly hate Citizens United and the revolving door of special interests into and out of government positions.
The amount of money that Republicans raise for political ads for both candidates and issues is astonishing. As we know those ads are usually filled with disinformation.
But what if there was an actual monetary cost to that disinformation?
The problem of too much money in the political system shows its face in numerous ways. We all rightly hate Citizens United and the revolving door of special interests into and out of government positions.
The amount of money that Republicans raise for political ads for both candidates and issues is astonishing. And it will increase. As we know those ads are usually filled with disinformation.
But what if there was an actual monetary cost to that disinformation?
There has been much talk about public funding of elections but this might be an interesting approach.
Currently every ad that a politician runs for a federal office must have some form of "I approve of this message" that was only implemented relatively recently to allegedly assuage "the nastiness" of political ads. It didn't help but it does show that reform to political ads is possible.
Sadly politicians only put up ads around election time and have to pick and choose what they are going to emphasize but there are important things happening that need to be told. But this doesn't happen because of cost.
But in every state in the country there are fines for littering. You can litter if you want to, but if you break a certain thresh hold you get a fine. Sadly this is not always enforced but the principle is there. Similarly environmental pollutants like carbon are up for regulation with a similar approach - you can pump carbon and other crap into the air if you want but there is a cost to it.
This is based on the principle that we are all entitled to clean air and a functioning biosystem.
So what if political ads from candidates and issue groups etc were considered pollution?
How would this work?
Every political ad would get graded by factcheck.org or politifact.com and get a grade as a five second stamp at the end of each ad.
"This ad gets an A for total accuracy from factcheck.org go to our website for more information"
or
This ad gets a C- for being mostly inaccurate from factcheck.org go to our website for more information
And so on... But here is the trick and where public financing of campaigns come in. Any ad above an A- would go on the air for free. There would be an increasing sliding cost scale for inaccurate ads. So Michele Bachman or the Clean Coal Institute can run their insane ads but they will have to pay for them if they are inaccurate and everyone would know they are inaccurate.
While Republicans would howl about this this is classic conservatism - lowering tax structures to get better investments.
In the same way we are entitled to clean air and water and are working to punish polluters who endanger that we are entitled to clean and truthful airwaves (which we all "own" and fund). We suffer with pollutants in the air and the airwaves.
Any ideas on how this idea might be refined or actually moved forward?