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By Root 988 0

is to send a check to her campaign committee. So you send a check—again, not necessarily even aware of how the desire to reciprocate has been induced by the congresswoman’s gift. At no point in this process has any law been broken. The earmark was not a quo given in exchange for a quid. No promise of anything in return need have been made. The earmark is instead simply part of the economy. Representative Peter Kostmayer (D-Pa.; 1977–1981, 1983–1993) described this dynamic precisely, and his own recognition of its stench:

I was once asked by a member of Congress from Pennsylvania to raise some money for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, and he gave me a list of universities that had gotten big federal grants—academic pork. And he asked me if I would make calls to the presidents of these universities across the state to get contributions. I decided I was uncomfortable doing it, and I didn’t do it.79

My point just now is not to criticize what earmarks support, though I’d be happy to do that as well. Whether you think the spending makes sense or not, my point is to get you to see the dynamic that earmarks support. Or better, the platform they help build. That platform enables a certain trade. The parties to that trade are lobbyists, their special-interest clients, and members of Congress. Because that platform supports a gift economy, the trade it enables does not cross the boundary of quid pro quo corruption. The lobbyists never need to make any link explicit. They’re proud of their “professionalism” in respecting that line. Indeed, they are surprised when anyone expressly crosses it. (Kaiser reports one example that reveals the understanding: The National Association of Home Builders was upset at a change made to certain pending legislation. In response, they expressly declared that there would be no further campaign contributions until the change was undone. “The statement raised eyebrows all over Washington. The NAHB had broken one of the cardinal rules of the game.”)80

The gains in this system that each of the three parties in the system—lobbyists, their clients, and members of Congress—realize should be obvious. (Indeed, there is valuable theoretical work suggesting just why the lobbying game proves to be more valuable than the bribery game, and why we should expect, over time, a democracy to move from bribery to lobbying.)81

But to make understandable the enormous growth in this “influence cash,” now leveraged by the “influence peddlers,” we should enumerate it just to be clear:

Members of Congress get access to desperately needed campaign cash—directly from the lobbyists, and indirectly, as facilitated by the lobbyists. They need that cash. That cash makes much simpler an otherwise insane existence, as it cuts back at least partially on the endless need of members to raise campaign funds elsewhere.

The clients of the lobbyists get a better chance at changing government policy. In a world of endless government spending and government regulation, that chance can be enormously lucrative. As researchers at the University of Kansas calculated, the return on lobbyists’ investment to modify the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to create a tax benefit was 22,000 percent.82 A paper published in 2009 calculates that, on average, for every $1 that an average firm spends to lobby for targeted tax benefits, the return is between $6 and $20.83 Looking at universities, John M. de Figueiredo and Brian S. Silverman found that universities with representation on the House or Senate Appropriations Committee see a 0.28 to 0.35 percent increase in earmarks for every 1 percent increase in lobbyist expenditures relative to universities without such representation.84 Frank Yu and Xiaoyun Yu found that “compared to non-lobbying firms, firms that lobby on average have a significantly lower hazard rate of being detected for fraud, evade fraud detection 117 days longer, and are 38% less likely to be detected by regulators.”85 Hill, Kelly, Lockhart, and Van Ness have demonstrated how “lobbying firms significantly outperform