Forum Post: $3.5 billion spent on Congress by lobbyists.
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 20, 2011, 3:29 p.m. EST by sej64
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What we need is 100 million people to give $50/yr and we can buy the same politians with our $5 billion. And get what WE want. Who's in??
No, we just need to take our government back. We don't need to add to the cash flow, we just need to stop it.
We dont have to buy congress. Let them waste their money buying congress. In the end we will control the country. Just like we did when we created the country.
It is disgusting.
I met one of them at a restaurant called Rock Bottom in Bethesda this past Tuesday. She touted her designer jacket, her expensive electronic devices, and corrected me on my use of the word 'empire'.
Come to find out...I was right in my use of the word, and she was wrong for thinking she can use the plight of Americans to buy her designer jacket.
She isn't using the plight of Americans to buy her designer jacket. She does not owe you anything. She does not owe you anything.
Re-reading my comment above, you will notice I dont mention anything about her owing me anything. In fact, the term 'owe' is not used or implied in my statement. It doesn't take a psychiatrist to recognize when someone is projecting their own feelings onto someone else.
Indeed, maybe you feel like you are owed something??? I'll leave that to you to sort out.
In the meantime, because you have difficulty staying within the confines of fact (i.e. the words I wrote in my comment), people like you and me can not have productive dialog.
Oops, I should have looked before I posted previously. There were 10,962 lobbyists in 2010, which corresponds to the $3.5B in the OP spent in the same year. That comes out to about $320,000/lobbyist. I sure wish you'd taken me up on that wager. :-)
I think a more meaningful statistic would be to show how much each member of congress received in contributions from lobbyists in a year. I'm still researching that part.
This is a country with three hundred million people. You probably think your number is gi-normous but it's really just $11.66 a person. Americans have a constitutional right to lobby the federal government.
308 million people.
We also have a constitutional right to bear arms. But, many of us don't. Why do you think that is? In my humble opinion, I believe the modern American doesn't need a gun to exercise justice. Similar to how I feel the modern American doesn't need lobbyist to exercise their needs or grievances.
I think your choice of denominators is misleading. I would wager that $5B mentioned in the OP that the number of actual contributors is far less than the entire population of the country. Can anyone post that statistic for us?