The Best "Democracy" Money Can Buy: For Every Dollar Spent Influencing US Politics, Corporations Get $760 Back
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/16/2015 18:37 -0400


The first time we read the recent analysis by the Sunlight Foundation in which it combed through 14 million corporate records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, in order to determine the "rate of return" on lobbying and spending to buy political goodwill, we were left speechless.

To be sure, we had previously shown that when it comes to the rate of return on lobbying, the rates were simply staggering, and ranged anywhere between 5,900% for oil subsidies, to 22,000% for multinational tax breaks and even higher for America's legal drug dealers.

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But nothing could prepare us for this.

According to the foundation's analysis, between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion (with a B) on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. What they gave pales compared to what those same corporations got: $4.4 trillion (with a T) in federal business and support.

Putting that in context, the $4.4 trillion total represents two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury. Said otherwise, by "spending: a paltry $6 billion to bribe the US government, or just a little more than what GM will spend on stock buybacks alone, US corporations are getting the direct benefit of two-thirds of US taxpayers' labor

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Which translates into an Internal Rate Of Return of, hold on to your hats folks, 75,900%!

Like we said, speechless.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-16...corporations-ge

Quote: Cincinnatus wrote in post #3

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"Open secrets lists the top giving donors and only two of the top fifteen gave to the Republicans"

And one of those, the National Assn of Realtors, gave 49% D, 51% R, so the difference is meaningless.

Then, too, according to this site, the Leftist unions the UAW (#20) and the CWA (#22) both gave 100% D and 1% R, which is a pretty neat hat trick.

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Quote: ThirstyMan wrote in post #2

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"We focused on the records of 200 for-profit corporations, all of which had active political action committees and lobbyists in the 2008, 2010 and 2012 election cycles — and were among the top donors to campaign committees registered with the Federal Election Commission. Their investment in politics was enormous. There were 20,500 paying lobbying clients over the six years we examined; the 200 companies we tracked accounted for a whopping 26 percent of the total spent. On average, their PACs, employees and their family members made campaign contributions to 144 sitting members of Congress each cycle.
snip
...for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government."
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Looking at the ZeroHedge numbers, they list the top two donors as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America
#1. Goldman Sachs $38 Million
#2. Bank of America $45 Million

But OpenSecret tells the story a little differently, putting those two companies quite a bit farther down on the list....
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

#15 $51,000,000,000 Goldman Sachs as giving to Liberal Democratic causes 54% to 46%

#45 $29,000, 000,000 Bank of America gives more to Conservative Republican causes by 59% to 41%

Open secrets lists the top giving donors and only two of the top fifteen gave to the Republicans. The rest were to Democrats.

Is this a case of deceptive numbers doing their thing again???

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Some interesting points from the Sunlight Foundation Report: