The ghost of public campaign funding still haunts us

Here's a quasi-election related chart to ponder today:

The remarkable thing isn't that fewer and fewer people are checking off the box on tax forms that funds the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. The remarkable thing is that anyone still checks it. But six million of us continue to check the box even though no presidential candidate since 2008 has accepted money from the fund.¹

As a result, there's $400 million idling away in the PECF going unused. You could buy a tenth of a Virginia class sub² for that! Or four F-35 fighter jets!

Or use it for election administration. Or state races. Or just get rid of the whole thing and return the fund to the Treasury (what we sophisticates like to call "a down payment on the national debt.") But surely we ought to do something?

¹This is because you can only receive PECF funds if you agree to a spending limit that's laughable by modern standards.

²That's a tenth of the model that includes an extra four tubes for launching 28 Tomahawk missiles in case the original 12 aren't enough.