Campaign money:
- 2016 Presidential campaigns netted $1,300M (source: FEC). ($325M/year averaged over 4 years as per @Philipp's comment)
- House: $967M ($484M/year averaged )
- Senate: $507M ($253M/year averaged)
- Total: $2,774M=$2.7B ($1062M=$1T/year averaged)
In reality, spending is slightly less since not 100% of funds is disbursed.
Funding with taxes:
In fiscal year 2015, the federal budget is $3.8 trillion (source, with data they used sourced from OMB).
Roughly 2/3 to 3/4th of that was on medicare, social security, unemployment, labor, education, VA and such (the pie chart under "All Federal Spending" section is best for one-glance view). I'm roughly eyeballing that at ~2.7T-$3T.
As such, if 100% of campaign money raised was spent as part of the federal budget, it would cover less that 0.1% (1/1000th) of said budget, even if we only cover "important spending on the people" and not entire budget.
If you adjust for @Philipp's comment that campaign spending is not annual, we
Annulaized results
As per @Philipp's comment, federal spending is an annual figure, whereas campaign spending for 2016 should really be amortized over 4 (pres) and 2 (congress) years. As such, the discrepancy and impact is even more than my original answer stated - campaign spending is 1/3600th of full budget (0.03%) and rises to a whole 0.037% if you only count budget pieces spent on "the people" directly.
Verdict:
Impact is insubstantial in the extreme.
solely for marketing a particular individual/party to be elected
While there may be many different opinions about how campaigns should be conducted and funded, It is difficult to imagine a working democracy if political candidates and parties cannot inform the voters of their ideologies and intentions.there may be many different opinions about how campaigns should be conducted and funded
. That said, I wonder why candidates waste so much in public acts and ads if the solution is just "1 big website", maybe their assessors are bad assessors and they do not do market research to find the most efficient way to convince people to vote for them, or maybe the answer is just not that simple.