How much would you pay for this? Annually? Lifetime membership? What do you think is a reasonable price?

Question

All membership dues will be TAX DEDUCTIBLE. This would be your annual dues for membership in a citizens group that does the following:

1. Sends out a comprehensive questionairre to candidates for public office and elected officials at the local, state and federal levels throughout the United States and allows those same candidates and elected officials to answer the questions in their own words defining their exact position on a comprehensive variety of questions instead of merely yes or no.
3. Gathers those responses and posts them on a single website. The details of that data would be viewable, in full, by members only. But also publishes responses, in a summary form, for the general public and media.
4. Allows members to complete the questionairre anonymously (although they can choose to make their responses public) and to add questions to the questionairre that is presented to candidates and elected officials. A summary of responses will be available to public/media/etc

Answer 1

A number of issue-advocacy groups do this already, some without charge. Getting responses from politicians is always "iffy."

Answer 2

Great idea! Though sending the results to the media who will propagate them for free makes me less inclined to pay the membership fee. There is one problem that is rampant that your idea does not address, and that is the way republicans lie about their platforms: "I am a fiscal conservative" "I'm against big government" "I'm for lower taxes" "I'm for better national security".

These are the claims of every republican candidate in recent memory. But they quickly turned the Clinton/Gore Budget surplus into a record shattering deficit, changed the laws to allow themselves to go deeper in debt than was even legal before, lowered taxes on big businesses and the wealthy while effectively raising taxes on the middle class (add up your property taxes, local taxes, etc, the total is higher than it was under Clinton, Nobel Prize winning economists predicted this would happen, when Bush first proposed his tax cuts), and they have done virtually nothing to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission (a commission they didn't even want to have in the first place).

Answer 3

What would John Kerry do? He didn't have a real thought the whole time he was running? When he changed his mind, would you send him a new one?

Overall the idea is not bad. It is so hard to see where everyone stands on the issues.

Answer 4

i already belong to such an organization.
it's a gay advocacy group in oklahoma.
they send questionnaires to politicians.
the politicians don't always respond to the questionaires.
but i use the info to decide my vote.
so there are models for this.
i pay maybe $30 a year or so to be a member.

Answer 5

not a penny. as no elected offical would ever fill anything out, a person on their team would research what the best answer would be then answer it with that.....nothing more than a waste of time and a huge waste of tree's for paper.

Answer 6

Pay for that nope!