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Show Campaign Expenses One of the perpicxing political problems of the day is that of campaign cam-paign expenditures. How much should a candidate for office be permitted to spend in behalf of his candidacy? Some of the amounts expended by recent candidates for the Senate Sen-ate seem unreasonably large, and in some ca;;es investigations of campaign funds have resulted in the barring of successful candidates. candi-dates. If such investigations are. to be continued, and they doubtless .will be. it seems that there should be a law definitely fixing the maximum max-imum amount that may be spent, as is done in some states with respect re-spect to state offices. With our ever growing number of voters it takes a lot of money to reach each voter in the larger states with even one piece of campaign cam-paign literature. In New York state there were 4,885,363 registered voters in 1928. If a single piece of literature were sent to each of these, and the cost of each piece, including postage, printing and addressing ad-dressing were cniy five cents, it would take nearly a quarter of a million dollars to do the job. This sum would leave little margin for the expense of compiling lists, travel tra-vel for speech making, newspaper advertising or other : expenditures inseparable from an aggressive cam paign. In Illinois and P ennsylvania the number of voters is approximately one third less that that in New York, so it would take at least $200, 000 to reach each voter with one piece of campaign literature and leave a small amount for other expenses ex-penses in either of these great states. These figures would only cover primary expenses, while in all three states mentioned there would be additional outlays necessary incident in-cident to the general election. All of which illustrates how futile fu-tile it is, generally speaking, for a poor man without rich supporters to aspire to high office. |