The U.S. Lobbying Disease

Click here for an article in the New York Times entitled "Kill Bill" by Thomas B. Edsall. It tells how corporations can win huge breaks from Congress for relatively small expenditures on lobbyists.

According to statistics ..., the prescription drug industry spent $116 million lobbying for legislation to prevent Medicare from bargaining down drug prices — legislation that enabled drug companies to make an additional $90 billion annually. That amounts to an extraordinary 77,500 percent return on investment. Oil companies, in turn, had a return on investment of 5,900 percent, and multinational companies, 22,000 percent.

Money spent on lobbying offers corporate America an eyepopping ROI (Return On Investment):

According to Drutman [Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation and an adjunct professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University], with whom I exchanged a number of e-mails, a study in The Journal of Law and Politics, “Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures,” estimated that “companies that lobbied on the [jobs] bill got a return of 22,000 percent on their investment, $220 in benefits for every $1 spent on lobbying.”

....

Lobbying, Drutman says, is simply

an investment strategy. What matters is not your win rate, but rather your net gain. So you could lose nine small battles, but win the one battle where most is at stake, and come out more than ahead.

While lobbyists can win huge benefits for their clients by getting favorable new initiatives passed into legislation, it's much easier and therefore more effective to simply block and impede any Congressional attempts to change the status quo:

The main function of agribusiness lobbyists, for example, is to preserve the status quo throughout the process of reauthorizing the Farm Bill, which covers five years. Their most important task is to preserve the network of subsidies and import restrictions that protect domestic commodities, from sugar to milk to peanuts, from foreign competition.

Similarly, the National Rifle Association’s major victory this year was not enacting a favored bill but killing legislation that would require expanded background checks for gun purchasers. Nathaniel Persily, a law professor and political scientist at Columbia, summed up the situation in an e-mail to The Times: “The greatest impact of lobbying is the most difficult to calculate: namely, preventing legislation from ever getting to the floor.”

Despite the reforms that have been aimed at them over the past few decades, lobbyists have become a semi-permanent class with ever-expanding reach – they write legislation, they kill legislation. They have usurped many of the political functions that once belonged to elected officials, in part by adapting to new political ecologies faster than those who seek to counter their influence.

Insofar as they are protecting the status quo, lobbyists insulate calcified interest groups from challenge. They put up roadblocks that become ever-higher barriers to innovation. At a time when sectors of the economy ranging from health care to education to manufacturing are under more or less permanent siege, the tentacles of the lobbying community are choking off open exchange between officeholders and the voters they represent. They have created and now maintain a stifling stasis. It is hard to see how this ends well.