There is a fundamental problem with ideas that are suppose to save billions of dollars. Spent money doesn't just vanish. Whenever someone spends a dollar, someone else gets that dollar. If that dollar wasn't spent, then the original owner would still have it, but the other person wouldn't have made a buck. The only question is, who would we prefer to have that buck? The money used for political campaigns doesn't come from the gov't, it comes from private sources.

It doesn't seem very democratic for politicians to be able to buy elections if they have deep enough pockets, but "taking turns" would mean that we could get stuck with leaders that are not really liked by anyone. Political finance reform needs to be better thought out than that.

OK, so each party gets 4 years to do whatever they want without any repercussions because they know they'll get back in 4 years later... Hmmm sounds like a good recipe for chaos to me. If you want to avoid waste of money to advertising there would be better ways of doing it such as a legal limit to expenditure rather than completely eliminating democracy.