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I was reading that billions of dollars are raised/spent during US political campaigns (president, senate, etc). I'm no expert in how this all works, but it seems to me that this money is used solely for marketing a particular individual/party to be elected and has no direct benefit on the people.
If this money were instead used towards activities or programs that the government normally funds with taxes, would that have any substantial impact?
In reality, spending is slightly less since not 100% of funds is disbursed.
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
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.
Impact is insubstantial in the extreme.
solely for marketing a particular individual/party to be electedWhile 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.