Thursday, November 14, 2013

Top Sectors That Throw Money at Congress


8 comments:

  1. I'm surprised that Defense is so far down on the list.

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    1. Not as much competition among the contractors, and a much higher degree of regulatory capture with their affiliated agencies (the largest of which is incapable of and/or unwilling to provide annual audited financial statements) means this sector doesn't have to spend as much on Congress.

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    2. Another contributing factor may be that it is easier to "sell" defense to Congresspeople. Ideologically speaking, statism's foundation is set in the idea that the State should provide a common defense. Combined with a very widely accepted premise, defense can get more bang for their buck.

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    3. Totally, savingspace37, I'm glad we can find something we agree on!

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  2. I don't mean to be a stickler, but isn't the gap between the total amount Health contribution bar of 24.5 million and the Labor contribution bar of 22.5 million are a little wider than they should be? Because the Communications/Electronics bar is only 18 mil and change and it is longer than the labor bar. I am pretty sure it is not an optical illusion because so much of Labor goes to Dems.

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  3. We forgot to include another lobbying group: government workers themselves

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  4. If yours is a company in one of these sectors, the thing of beauty is that you make all this money back as a result of the legislative favors you're sector is granted. Thus you can fold the expenses into your cost of revenue via pricing protection, or you may receive direct taxpayer subsidies. In the American system (modern globalized variant), consumers and/or taxpayers foot the bill.

    No amount of legislative reform will ever change this. As long as we have a government, the only way to effectively limit rent seeking behavior is to restrict the amount of money available to it.

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  5. #1 is real estate. I talked to a guy earlier this week at the bar in the St. Francis (a self-described democrat) who was in San Francisco for the National Association of Realtors conference. He said Hillary Clinton came and spoke at the conference, and they paid her $200k for it. I asked what political favors they wanted from her because clearly she's not there for her real estate expertise. He seriously said (and supported) they wanted relaxed lending standards and more support from government to help first time buyers get houses. I asked him if he thought that was wise given what happened last time and he said he didn't think it should be as lax as it was before. Gotta love the circle of life!

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