Our federal government is spending way too much. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the federal government will spend about $6.2 trillion this year. When you consider that revenues are expected to be $4.8 trillion, our federal government is spending far more than they take in. This has resulted in about $33 trillion in national debt.
The corporate welfare kings have taken advantage of a federal government willing to spend more than they have. While average Americans squeak by in this era of high inflation and low confidence in the economy, the D.C. lobbying class has a sense of entitlement to federal funds. This is a problem that constitutional minded politicians need to address.
One vexing problem is figuring out how the massive numbers of lobbyists in Washington have impacted the growth of government. The high water mark for the number of lobbyist was 2007 when there were 14,816 and last year there were 12,644. The amount spent on lobbying has gone from $3 million in 1960 to well over $3 billion in 2022. The massive amount of spending is no coincidence.
This established lobbying presence in Washington has created a new entitlement culture. With all the lobbyists pushing for appropriations and special interest favors, we now have large corporations looking for handouts instead of trying to protect them from over taxation and too much regulation. Lobbying is part of our system, but the current way lobbying is conducted is more so with a handout for taxpayer cash rather than petitioning for redress of grievances.
One piece of legislation that was a magnet for lobbyists seeking cronyism and handouts was the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. That bill was loaded with corporate welfare projects. The House Ways & Means Committee released a report on April 25, 2023, the Joint Committee on Taxation’s (JCT) estimated that the advertised cost of the bill was half of what it likely would cost – about $570 billion. The Committee cited “the new advanced manufacturing credit for wind, solar, and batteries will cost $136 billion – over four times higher than JCT’s original $31 billion score.” They estimated that the advanced credit for batteries was $197 billion and IRA tax credits were over $1 trillion. The reason why all the inflation in what the advertised cost was of the bill versus the actual cost is because of all the lobbyists pushing for provisions in the bill hiking the cost to the taxpayer.
The lobbyist entitlement culture extends to defense contracting. Forbes reported on January 11, 2023 that a successor contractor was chosen to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with something called the “Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft.” The result was the contractor filing a protest that “the Army had a predetermined outcome for the competition that undermined equal treatment of the offerors; that subjectivity contaminated the comparison of competing designs; that some criteria used in selecting a winner were not stated in the solicitation.” Translated into English, a contractor (in this case Lockheed Martin but they are not the only offender) lost a contract, and they are pulling out all the stops, including going to Congress to get the requirements changed, with lobbyists to slow walk any possible change to the contract so they can continue their current deal.
A third example of how the lobbyist entitlement culture has infected Washington is the feeding frenzy that occurred after the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was passed into law Jason Brennan, Georgetown University professor, was quoted at The Mercatus Center was quoted as saying that a study released by Utah State University professors found, “that more intense lobbying and political activity made firms more likely to receive TARP funding, likely to receive a larger amount of it, and more likely to receive it sooner.” They found that “for every dollar spent on lobbying during the five years before the TARP bailout, firms received between $485.77 and $585.65 in TARP support.” This is evidence of cronyism and the fact that many government officials end up lobbying for corporate interests that they oversaw when in the federal government.
The federal government is spending far more than they take in and we the people are suffering for it. Lobbyists are not lobbying for American taxpayers; they are lobbying against them. The American people need to send politicians to Washington who get this and promise to clean up the DC swamp.