Politic

Does anybody else find the amount of money spent on political campaigning absolutely ridiculous? I was listening to NPR on the way home from work and they stated that the MN senatorial candidates had $18MM and $16MM in their respective coffers. If we just use $17MM as an average and multiply that by 100 senate seats, it would equal $1.7 billion. If we divide that by 6 (every seat is up for election every 6 years) that would equal $283MM per year. That is a lot of money that could go towards reducing our national debt. Let's also not forget that this is only senatorial campaigns. If we were truly honest, is any amount of campaign spending going to change 95% of the voters minds anyhow?