No, they don’t all have to be assumed. What needs to happen is something resembling their budget, on the order of plus or minus a few trillion dollars, is implemented.
At least $100 billion = the approximate marginal altruistic value of the “better” candidate. I think this is also very conservative. The annual federal budget is around $3 trillion right now, making $12 trillion over a 4-year term, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney differ on trillions of dollars in their proposed budgets. It would be pretty strange to me if, given a perfect understanding of what they’d both do, I would only care altruistically about 100 billion of those dollars, marginally speaking.
ETA: However, even this is unlikely to be entirely affected by the outcome of the presidential election, as this depends mostly on Congress.
No, they don’t all have to be assumed. What needs to happen is something resembling their budget, on the order of plus or minus a few trillion dollars, is implemented.
ETA: However, even this is unlikely to be entirely affected by the outcome of the presidential election, as this depends mostly on Congress.