In 2007, I posted:

You get what you pay for?
or
Thoughts in favor of much better compensation for elected officials

Now check out this study:

Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think

Specifically - check out this graphic:


Yeah.

That is the entire problem of US politics.

The smart people in your country are leveraging $5.8 billion over a decade to receive in return a thousand times more in favorable regulation and subsidies. It all ends up being paid to them at your expense. It's literally taken out of your paycheck.

The only reason this can happen is because you just don't want to pay your politicians well. They run a $10 trillion dollar country, and you're too stingy to pay them anything remotely resembling that responsibility.

So corporations pay instead. With your money. And it ends up costing you a thousand times more.

We can argue about getting money out of politics all day, but that's not really how this works. You need to get money into politics. If politicians are properly compensated by you, they will be harder to buy by others.

What they want is power. They wouldn't bend to corporations if they didn't happen to also need money.