NEWS ANALYSIS (The Borowitz Report)—One day after the costliest Presidential election in U.S. history, Americans awoke to the ugly realization that the nation had spent $2.5 billion with absolutely nothing to show for it.

“Four years ago, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, and that is still the case,” says Professor Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota. “The only difference is that we as a nation are out $2.5 billion.”

Mr. Logsdon claims that America’s system of egregious political spending “has made us the laughingstock of the world,” arguing, “Even Greece would know better than to blow through money like that.”

But “not so fast,” says Tracy Klugian, President of the Negative Advertising Association of America, which represents the nation’s leading producers of political attack ads.

“When people complain about how expensive these political campaigns are, they’re forgetting about the millions of Americans who are employed making negative ads,” he says. “Say what you will about lies, vitriol and character assassination, they’re job creators.”

In fact, Mr. Klugian says, America’s costly and interminable campaigns are the nation’s most reliable source of employment: “They gave a completely unskilled person like Mitt Romney a steady job for eight years.”

Acknowledging that the $2.5 billion spent this year was a “tidy sum,” Mr. Klugian says, “If we took all the money we spend on political ads and used it to educate our children and feed the poor, we wouldn’t be America.”

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Photograph by Landon Nordeman.