It is a fact that campaign expenses have ballooned. The 2008 presidential election cost a record $2.4 billion. Today, the U.S. presidential election has indeed become an expensive event. In terms of campaign funds for the U.S. presidential election alone, when running for president in 1860, the Republican Party only spent $100,000 to make Abraham Lincoln the sixteenth president of the United States; but within a hundred years Later in 1960, $100,000 was enough to get a candidate to appear on national television for 30 minutes. Judging from the changing trend of election expenditures for US presidential candidates from 1976 to 2008, especially after 2000 ($343.10 million), the expenditures for almost every election increased exponentially: 2004 ($717.9 million) and 2008 year ($1,324.7 million).

The above are only the expenses of candidates. If the expenses of all candidates, political parties, political organizations and funding groups in congressional elections and presidential elections are added up, the cost of US elections in 2008 exceeded 5.3 billion US dollars. , US$2.4 billion was spent on the presidential election, and the direct investment by presidential candidates exceeded US$1 billion for the first time this year. (According to statistics from the Center for Responsive Politics). This year, the cost of the presidential election is likely to set a new record of $3 billion.

Expensive but acceptable: The investment in electing the president is equivalent to what Americans spend on chewing gum

Although countless people accuse the US election of "burning money", in fact, the cost of the election is It's a lot but not unacceptable. Comparing the US$2.4 billion directly spent on the presidential election in 2008 with some other data from the United States, we can intuitively see that this expenditure is not sky-high. The US gross national product (GDP) in 2007 was US$13.8 trillion, and campaign spending of US$2.4 billion accounted for approximately 0.017% of it. Based on the population of the United States of more than 300 million at that time, each American only spent 8 US dollars on the presidential election, which only cost 2 US dollars per year. According to statistics from the American Chewing Gum Manufacturers Association, the United States spends about $2.3 billion on chewing gum every year, which is equivalent to the cost of the 2008 presidential election, and such a presidential election will only be held every four years. It is worth adding that the U.S.’s election fundraising methods are different from those of other countries, so horizontal comparisons are of little significance. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, in the 2005 election, each British person only paid 1-2 pounds (2-3 US dollars) for the general election. It seems lower than that in the United States, but part of the cost of the British election comes from the government's public funds. There is an upper limit on public campaign funds (￡70 million in 2005), which directly limits campaign investment in the UK, while in the United States, it comes from private donations and is very flexible.