I would say this is insane, but we passed insane some time ago and are rounding the bend of permanent dystopian hellscape.
Our abbreviated update to that report includes data from the fourth quarter of 2017, when comprehensive tax legislation was passed. Using federal lobbying disclosure data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), we are able to calculate that a total of 7,088 lobbyists worked on tax issues in 2017. Read the full updated report here.
That figure equals more than 60 percent of the 11,444 lobbyists who reported working on any issue in 2017. It also works out to 13 lobbyists for every member of Congress. Put another way, it’s as if roughly the entire undergraduate enrollment of Georgetown University emptied out of school and poured onto Capitol Hill to influence elected officials and their staffs day in and day out.
Thirty-five separate industries dispatched at least 150 lobbyists each. Three industries – pharmaceuticals, insurance, and electronics – deployed more than 500 lobbyists each. Twenty-three individual corporations and organizations dispatched at least 50 lobbyists apiece, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which hired an astounding 115 lobbyists.
Single industries have more federal lobbyists on tap than there are United States senators; some industries have more than one lobbyist per House member.
In sum total there were 70 tax lobbyists for every single senator, and 13 lobbyists per member of Congress, all working to craft American tax policy on behalf of, well, whoever paid them the most money to do it.
It's not exactly a surprise, then, that Republicans were hell-bent on passing new tax laws benefiting corporate interests; it's also no surprise that the results were a conflicting and ambiguous hodgepodge. Ya pays your money, you gets your own paragraph in the newest American law.
We cannot, one would think, continue to craft laws based primarily around which industries can pay the most money to influence the debate. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies are two of the groups most commonly associated with crooked marketplace behaviors; they have held regulatory and legal changes at bay by flooding government office with smartly dressed supplicants.
But I can think of no immediate fix. Perhaps the federal government can itself hire a similarly sized phalanx of lobbyists to represent the American people at large; that is, for every industry-paid lobbyist to enter the halls, government itself is required to provide poor Americans or medicine-using Americans or insurance-needing Americans with a lobbyist of their own. What the hell, just monetize the whole system. If our lawmakers can be bought, we should at least get a seat at the auction ourselves.