What a waste of money

So another election finally reaches its conclusion.  It seems the final cost of the election will be of the order of $6 Billion.  This is a significant sum of money.  The voting age population is around 230 million.  So this appears to be a cost of around $26 for every voting citizen in the US.  Rather a lot if you ask me.  If we accept that 10% of this cost is necessary and generously assume that 90% of this spend is waste then we reach a figure of $5.4Bn that could have been spent elsewhere. 

Ill health and starvation are obvious alternatives for spending and if we assume it costs around $1 a day to keep a child from starvation and recognise that this waste only occurs every 4 years then the available annual spend is around $1.35Billion.  Which it seems would be enough to save 3.7 Million children from starvation.  Allegedly around 13,000 children die each day from malnutrition so spending less on US elections alone could cure 80% of the problem with child hunger in the world.

Better still of course would be to not have elections at all and move to on-going participation by citizens in making decisions on a global basis as I have outlined is the governance  model  that operates on the more advanced planets.

If disease is considered as an alternative priority to hunger then a malaria prevention kit costs around $20 and it is only $5 for rotavirus vaccine according to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus_vaccine

So that would allow 270 Million children to be vaccinated against this nasty disease.

Obviously this analysis only looks at the actual election and related costs.  Arguably this is only a small part of the problem as people funding electoral campaigns are probably much closer to the Shylock than the Mother Teresa School of giving.  Consequently whoever is elected will be expected to lavishly reward those who helped get them there and consequently 4 more years of bad decision making can be anticipated whoever gets elected today.

The other significant problem with current politics is the highly adversarial and somewhat childish nature of debate.  In England they say Prime Ministers are made on the playing fields of Eton.  The problem is that there is very limited evidence of politicians actually maturing and progressing beyond childish antics and points scoring exercises.  If we are to move forward we need to look at a far more co-operative approach to problem solving and avoid concentrating so much power in so few hands.   Fortunately we now have the technology to make this possible.   We just need to improve democracy by incorporating existing technology to allow on-going participation in the process.  The current arrangement of lobbying and waste is truly horrific and holding back human progress.  In no sense can it be regarded as a pinnacle of human organisation and achievement.