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It's not that easy, because not all groups are affected equally by all policies. With taxes, for instance, the analysis would suggest that nonprofits are the most powerful group in the country - businesses can occasionally bring their income tax down to $0 with tricky accounting, but nonprofits are exempt as a matter of right! I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion, and I'm pretty sure it's not the one you had in mind.

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Of course it's not that easy -- just because taxes are relatively easy to compare does not mean that they are easy to compare. Good comparisons are always difficult.

Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and unfortunately that is the entire point.

Let's disentangle the players in this in the following way. Because it would be absurd to believe charities are the most powerful entities, and "tricky accounting" etc reduces tax liabilities to the actual powerful, is there a way to discharge the conflict? Yes, there is. The charities are created by and funded by the actually powerful. I read somewhere that Sierra Club (and Greenpeace?) received millions more from the energy industry than in personal checks from concerned citizens, and among other things, one might consider tax policy a firmer decision making footing than organizational altruism.

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