Election is coming and we see a lot of commercials in newspapers, television and radio that features one or two candidates. They don't tell what they run for but it's too obvious. Unless you've been living under the rock for the past two years, these candidates are aiming for the highest position in the land, vice-president, senator or any of the positions in your area.
In every advertisement about the candidate (printed or not) we always something that goes like this:
"Paid for by friends of"
This means someone paid for the commercial instead of the candidate. This also means the presidential candidates are the friendliest people in the land because they have so many friends willing to pay for these ads.
I was a bit curious and I researched why did this happen. While I did not get direct responses online, I found out that candidates are limited on their campaign funds. By law the presidential candidate is only allowed to spend PHP10 per registered voter. There are more than 40 million voters in the country which means each candidate should spend around 400 million.
400 million per candidate is a lot but think about it - ad spots in various media outlets costs a lot. It's even a conservative estimate that a candidate might spend half a million in television, radio and newspaper ads every day. They also have to spend on travel and pay a lot of people to work for them. 400 million is never enough.
One way they might skirt this limitation is to simply add the phrase "paid for by" if everything is paid for by their friends, it might look like they did not spend anything at all.
So what do you think? Are they really friendly enough or just trying to make things complicated?