Jim,
>I'm very curious as to how the U.S. voters on the UT view this situation. Are you confident that party nominees will be unemcumbered by financial 'gifts'? Are you confident that the party nominees will be taking care of the needs and desires of 'you the People'?

Can you propose a better/cleaner system ? Here in germany every party gets "reimbursed" between 1 and 5$ for every vote in addition to some also regulated financial gifts. Even the non-voting part is distributed on the assumption that not-voting was only a mistake and the efforts were done to reach them - the possibility that voters hate each party enough not to wish them reimbursed is not officially considered by politicians. OTOH the budget deficits of nearly all democracies (esp. after the introduction of rules to stop outright inflationary money printing) speak clearly of another way to "buy" votes. And no - I don't have a better way, even if I sometimes wonder about partioning votes between people's head counts for one house and weighted votes according to taxes paid (including corporations taxes!) for a balancing second house. Then outright bribary will probably be only happening if proven to be more successful and cheaper even after factoring in the risk of being caught.

my 0.01 EUR (after taxes... <g>)

thomas