Lawmakers raise record amounts of campaign contributions

Leave it to the politicians to figure out how to do more. For themselves. In Wisconsin, our legislature draws a full-time salary while spending only a few days in session each year. They get a valuable pension and money for meals and lodging. And what have they done for us? They sure haven’t fixed our roads. What they have done is to make themselves richer, and paved their path for re-election with plenty of campaign cash. More than ever before. Apparently our state lawmakers felt they just weren’t able to raise enough on the campaign trail, so they changed the rules. Blew them up actually. They passed laws increasing donation limits for individuals and political action committees, while allowing corporations to donate directly to their campaigns for the first time. It is no surprise then that the amount of money are lawmakers are raking in on the campaign trail have skyrocketed. In the first six months of this year, Wisconsin’s Republican and Democrat parties raised $4.9 million in campaign contributions. That is three times as much as they raised two years ago, and five times as much as they raised four years ago. Our elected officials have gotten very good at getting re-elected. They sure spend a lot of time on it. Way more than they actually spend working for us. It seems their real full-time job is raising money for themselves, while we continue to pay them a full-time salary for their other job.