U.S. taxpayers give $15 million apiece to Democrats and Republicans for their conventions. Taxpayers in host cities and host states pay even more. This doesn't include the $50 million that each party gets for convention security in a post-9/11 world.Conservative parties may be a little better than fully-fledged socialist ones, but as the British Tories, the American Republicans and, closer to home, the Icelandic Independence Party have shown, they can be pretty grabby when in comes to doling out taxpayer money to pet projects. The real difference is in which projects they want to fund.
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Yet Democrats claim to be for the "common people" and Republicans feign concern about our tax burdens - while both put the squeeze on us taxpayers.
Even that difference, however, is vanishing as Bush's Medicare package, and the Tories' "We don't want to abolish welfare, we want it to work better" aproach have shown. As for the Icelandic IP - they've always been socialist, only less so than the social democrats and communists.
I'm not sure if the Icelandic state subsidizes political party conventions here, or if so by how much. Will find out, so stay tuned.
Update:
According to the last budget bill the Icelandic state gives cash grants to those political parties which got at least 2,5% of all votes cast in the last general election. This year the grant total is to the tune of 180 million icelandic krónur, about $2,5 million.
As Americans are about 1000 times more numerous than Icelanders, we might (if we care nothing about the careful use of statistics) infer that this is as if the US governmental bodies gave $2,5 billion - every year - to Americal political parties.
