What About The Lobbying Tax?

Those who argue for tort reform sometimes claim that there's a tort tax that costs every American money.  By their logic, we're also forced to pay a Lobbying Tax.

"As President Bush campaigned for reelection pledging to protect doctors and insurance companies from patient lawsuits while easing the tax burden on businesses, industry groups spent record amounts of money lobbying to influence the White House, Congress and their constituents.

Special interests spent $1.1 billion during the first half of 2004 on lobbyists and advertising campaigns, according to public records that interest groups are required to file with the Senate.

Reports tallying lobbyist expenditures for the rest of the year are due in February — and industry insiders expect the yearly total to exceed last year's record of roughly $2 billion.

"A lot of business groups have been waiting for years, if not decades, for all the political stars to be aligned so they could get legislation passed on issues like medical malpractice," said Stephen Moore, who heads the Club for Growth, a leading business advocacy group."

Nice to know that big business is spending billions of dollars to buy legislation that will screw the average American. 

Comments

[Ted]

So by your best estimate, the lobbying tax is less than 1% of the underestimate for the tort tax that TTP provides. And the biggest spenders in lobbying groups are unions. Of course, the most successful special interest, included in that $2 billion figure, is the American Trial Lawyers Association--and their largesse doesn't even include the millions given by their rank-and-file. http://www.ecrets.org/orgs/index.asp

'"Trial lawyers have had more influence in the Senate and are pumping more money into Senate campaigns," says James Thurber, PhD, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington.

'Albertine of the American League of Lobbyists adds: "ATLA [Association of Trial Lawyers of America] is uniformly preventing any, even minor, revision in the tort reform laws because it is a bread-and-butter issue for them."'