system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: All presidential candidates and senators should have a fixed election budget.

Whenever there is a controversial vote on something, it's mentioned how xy person is getting donations from a company to which it matters how the vote turns out.

With presidental candidates, it's similar - donations from companies are interpreted as attempts to make potential presidents more likely to conform to needs of these companies - such as by cutting taxes.

I feel like this would be resolved by making the election budgets come from taxes. While it would be a huge cost for the taxpayers, it would make for political candidates which would be much harder for companies to sway in their favour.
Think net neutrality and congress donations from ISP's.

In the process, election budgets would be made considerably smaller, to save on taxes. As this would apply to everyone, there wouldn't be anyone at a disadvantage.

One problem I see is filtering the candidates. Obviously you can't just give money to anyone who asks for a budget, but seems like a solvable problem. Perhaps the party could only propose a set number of candidates.
gpt
* This gives a huge advantage to people that already have celebrity status.  Tweeting at your 5 million twitter followers is free.
* This gives a huge advantage to people who are rich and can fund their own pre-campaign where they make stump speeches, etc before announcing and starting their campaign.
* This gives more influence to people with an existing microphone, such as a Fox news or MSNBC commentary show that decides to back you and spend a bunch of airtime talking about how great you are.  That becomes even more problematic if it isn't just a show, but an entire network backing a candidate.
* This gives more power to people taking advantage of the citizens united decision to spend their own money without coordinating with the campaign.  It also makes the quality of that coordinating much more important.  You could have a majority of the money spent on your campaign being spent by external groups not coordinating with your campaign and they might unintentionally screw you over because of the lack of coordination.