Money Buys Elections: The candidate who spends the most money usually wins. Is the money the cause of victory? People donate when the race is close and when the race is not. Any presidential candidate must have a shot at win or else no one would donate. No one gives money to what they believe is a losing bid. The appealing candidate wins more easily; voter appeal of a candidate is expressed in monetary terms. The amount of money spent by the candidates doesn’t matter at all. A losing candidate who doubles spending will only impact their vote total by 1%, according to Levitt. What matters is who you are not how much money you get. Although, money indicates who you are…. The amount of money on campaign finance is viewed by some to be far too high…a lot of money is spent but this is extremely important. BUT to put that into perspective Americans spend more on chewing gum then their political parties. Clinton spent over 100,000 USD on each Delegate during the recent Democratic Primaries.

Who Cheats and Why? They both cheat. People cheat when the stakes are low. Every clever person with an incentive scheme has been circumvented by those who try to beat it. Cheating is a primordial act: getting more for less. The waiter who pockets his tips instead of pooling them. Social incentives are extremely powerful. The Scarlet Letter is about moral punishment of adulterers. Social incentives will prevent individuals from becoming criminals. Parents at a daycare centre is another example. The incentive was a fine to pick up kids on time because parents picking their kids up late. But this policy led to parents buying off their guilt. Washington saw that the Tea tax a very small thing, leads to massive impact. This is another case of cheating the system leading to major change. Recently, tax revenues showed that 7 million dependent children disappeared from IRS data bases because tax payers now had to provide a social security number for those children. The result was that all the cheaters could no longer circumvent the IRS and phantom dependents disappeared: NOTE that there may the problem that extremely poor people may not have social security numbers.

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High Stakes Testing for Schools in the US rewards: schools that improve their quality of testing get rewarded. No Child Left Behind rewards schools that have good numbers and punishes those who have poor results. This means that Teachers will focus on this test; they will also emphasize the importance of tests over acutally learning. It fails to address that some smart students do poorly. In France, they stream line and teach only for the tests. What also happens is that teachers will try to improve their students scores so that the school gets a higher rating. Teacher cheating is rarely punished. Teachers can inflate their scores. The teachers may prepare the students for specific questions. Teachers can teach to the test questions. Teachers will advise that students fill in the blanks in multiple-choice questions. Teachers may erase the wrong answers and fill in the right ones. How do you catch a cheater? The Chicago school systems showed irregularities in test scores.

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