POLITICIANS SUCK
It should be illegal for governments to lobby.
Governments and their departments, public authorities, and taxpayer-funded colleges.
It just makes no sense for them to take taxpayer dollars and put them in the hands of lobbyists – who turn around and put them in the pockets of politicians.
It is nothing less than money laundering, the circuitous route money takes as it is picked from your pocket and put into a politician’s.
It should be illegal.
It won’t ever be, of course, because that would require the cooperation of the politicians. It would require them to put your interests above theirs, and that will never happen.
It comes as a surprise to most people when they learn that untold thousands of American cities and counties – along with colleges, airports and water departments – have big contracts with lobbyists.
These groups use money they have taxed from their constituents to pay lobbyists to represent the groups’ interests in the state and national capitals.
At least that’s the pretense.
You are told that it’s a good investment of your money because it helps “leverage” state or federal money coming back to your community.
Which is kind of whacked, if you think about it.
They charge you $5 to get back $10 you already paid in. They charge you for access to your own money. It is a double tax, a surcharge of oppression.
But the pretense is a lie.
Using the unerring principle of Follow The Money, lobbying is simply the system the politicians use to make you pay for their enrichment. They want to run for office, they want to buy lunch and not have to pay, they want to live high on the back of political contributions, and they do that by taking your money.
Not just through your paltry but freewill direct contributions, but through government lobbying. The city hires a lobbyist, it takes taxpayer money to do it, the lobbyist buys influence by making donations from the fees it is paid. The dollar is taken from you by the politicians who give it to a lobbyist who gives it back to the politicians who put it in their pockets.
And when a taxpayer-funded highway department or college or public airport gives money to lobbyists, it is as if the politicians are appropriating money to themselves. They set the budget or aid levels for the institution, the institution pays a lobbyist, the lobbyist gives money to the politicians.
So that more money for education or transportation of environmentalism invariably means more money for politicians and the lobbyists.
It’s a system of prostitution in which everyone is a pimp, everyone is a whore and everyone is a john.
And none of it is necessary.
Because all of these entities already have representatives, they already have people whose job is to stand up for their interests.
They’re called state legislators and members of Congress.
A city should not pay a lobbyist, it should call its congressman. A college should not retain a firm, it should talk to its senator. Rather than sending lobbying money to the state capital, a college or highway department should have a sit down with its state legislators.
It is their job to represent constituent interests.
And it is the politicians’ job to listen.
Except that actually listening to and representing constituents – doing the job they were elected to do – isn’t in the financial best interest of the politicians.
If you work through a constituent’s problems and push forward legislation to help them, you get a handshake and a smile of appreciation. If you, instead, do what a lobbyist wants done, you get a giant check.
And human nature likes a check.
And politicians like money.
And so we have the system we have. A system in which special interest money and lobbying have drowned out the impulse and obligation of true public service.
A system in which you are taxed to bribe a politician to raise your taxes.
Literally.
Lobbyists usually get hired to find appropriations – to get the politicians to send taxpayer money to pay for somebody’s pet project. Those appropriated dollars are all either taxed or borrowed dollars. Either way, they come out of your pocket – the only issue is when.
So you are taxed to raise your taxes.
You are taxed so politicians can double dip – getting both a paycheck and a campaign contribution.
You are taxed so that the middlemen, the connected gladhanders known as lobbyists, can live off the drippings of the blood politicians suck.
Let me repeat that last part: Politicians suck.
And lobbying is just one way they do it.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
