Comment by outsidetheparty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outsidetheparty | Hacker News Reader

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outsidetheparty

I mean… yes? I thought this was common knowledge; there’s certainly no shortage of documentation available: the ROI from lobbying efforts is insanely high, on the order of 75,000% by many estimates.

I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.

(Not so clear, personally, how you justify transposing this semiconductor handout to the more superficially defensible “national security”; but see also fossil fuel subsidies, corporate tax breaks, barring negotiated drug pricing: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/politics/amazing-ro... )

As for “why is it so cheap”? I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.

It’s very low effort for a corporation to threaten to offshore and ask for a handout to not follow through on the threat. And it’s a very easy call for the politician to take the bribe, because then they can go back their constituency and say “We saved your jobs from going to China!” Everybody wins except the taxpayers. (And the corporations will go ahead and offshore, or not, just like they would have anyway, because one of the services they pay their lobbyists for is ensuring there will be no consequences for accepting the handout.)

>I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.

This is wrong. That's not what lobbying is understood to be. I think you're confusing lobbying with campaign contributions or PAC money. Lobbying is basically just advocating.

>I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.

That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?

> Lobbying is basically just advocating.

That's fair. I was imprecise: I should have made it explicit that I was speaking about lobbying in America:

> The one big difference between the US and the EU is that the majority of policymakers in the EU institutions are not elected, and since they do not need to stand for elections, they do not need to find the significant amounts of cash to support campaigns. Instead of spending innumerable hours fundraising, they balance competing interests in an effort to produce policies that are seen as legitimate, though produced by a less-than-democratic supranational structure. https://www.politico.eu/article/why-lobbying-in-america-is-d...

US Lobbyists funneled a total of 3.77 billion dollars into campaign coffers in 2021, and are already over 2 billion for 2022. I hope it's not necessary to point out that they're not doing that without the expectation of a return on that investment (and as we've already seen, they absolutely are getting that ROI.)

> That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?

Not sure I see how it's dodging the question, especially since my following paragraph continues not dodging it in greater detail.... but setting that aside, the obvious answer to "why are there so few funding sources" is "there is a finite number of wealthy individuals and organizations", with a side order of "and they tend to consolidate their lobbying activities into industry groups". (To be specific, in 2022 that finite number is 11,441.)

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying

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