According to reporter Jeffrey H. Birnbaum in the Washington Post (February 14, 2006, “Clients’ Rewards Keep K Street Lobbyists Thriving“),
Annual fees paid to registered lobbyists reached $2.1 billion in 2004 — the latest full year for which figures are available — a 40 percent increase from 1999. For 2005, lobbying revenue is on pace to rise by at least $300 million.
The returns on money invested in lobbying are astonishing. What’s remarkable is how little is spent to get shares of a nearly $2.8 trillion annual budget.
Two excellent studies of the process of investments in rent extraction are The Transfer Society: Economic Expenditures on Transfer Activities, by David N. Laband and George C. McClintock, and Money for Nothing : Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion, by Fred McChesney. McChesney argues that the picture isn’t quite as it’s often presented, with rapacious private interests shoveling money to politicians and their causes in exchange for rents; politicians learned long ago to threaten private sources of wealth with expropriation (a process that can take many forms, from taxation to “regulation”) in order to shake them down for contributions and other forms of homage.
This is nothing more than bribery and deception. A government Enron. The Abramoff scandal, to me, is a confirmation that our government and lawmakers are no better than the Mafia. As we all know, this is not new, it’s been going on for years. Yet, they, that is lawmakers, go out the way to police what they perceive as crooked business. When they should be policing themselves. The U.S. government’s railroading over the U.S. taxpayer unchallenged is very disturbing.
If they, that is congress, wanted to clean this up, all they have to do is deregulate the economy.
Over regulation has lead some honest people to be dishonest. What taxpaying, law abiding US citizen wants to be ripped off by their own government?
Anyway, I wouldn’t trust the claims about how little money it takes to get the big payoff. Where’s Sarbane and Oxley?
Aldactone.
Drug interactions with aldactone. Aldactone phenobarbital and dogs. Hyperkalemia caused by aldactone. Problems with aldactone.