A central theme to both The Middle Class Forum and the collection of essays, Systems out of Balance, is that misinformation is a root cause of harmful long term trends. Misinformation does not come cheaply. While honest and open information spreads freely and effortlessly (the Model T needed no advertising), convincing people to buy crap products or crap ideas takes a good bit of money. Here’s a good hypothesis that stems from this principle. The more often you hear a particular idea being spun on corporate news media, particularly the 24 hour variety, the more likely you are hearing misinformation that corporations find worth investing in.
The presidential campaigns have a lot at stake. To achieve their goal they put out a lot of misinformation that either inflates their image or deflates their opponent’s. The Center for Responsive Politics is an excellent organization that keeps track of campaign spending, not to mention lobbying and other misinformation tactics. On their web site you can find this graph of presidential campaign spending to date.
Total Spending by
Presidential Candidates*
Total Spent
Year 20081 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 1980 1976
Total $833.8
* In millions
1 so far
Numbers are not adjusted for inflation.
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center.
They state that this information is not controlled for inflation. So much the better! We already have explored on The Middle Class Forum how unreliable those “constant” or “real” dollars are. We are better off applying our own inflation index. A variety of important economic statistics, such as gross domestic product and personal income, have inflated by a factor between 9 and 10, from 1974 to 2006. We see from this table that presidential campaign spending has inflated by a factor close to thirteen in a similar time span. Going by my hypothesis, this means that the mission to spread misinformation in presidential elections has increased significantly beyond the rate of inflation.
Tags: Economic Trends, Middle Class Politics, Misinformation
