Wall Street Spending $1.5M a Day on Lobbying, Campaigns
You gotta pay to play
The financial sector has shelled out more than $800 million to influence Washington via lobbying and campaign spending in the current election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Financial Reform.
That works out to roughly $1.5 million a day, a total on pace to eclipse Wall Street's effort four years ago to beat back the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the left-leaning policy group said.
Dodd-Frank was ultimately enacted in July 2010, and the landmark statute turned four this week. But nearly half of hundreds of regulations required by the law remain incomplete, and battles persist over their final language.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
The industry would not be structured at all like it is without government power. Since government power has a more pronounced effect on their bottom line, it makes sense that their self-interest necessarily compels them to expand government power at the expense of the shrunken vestige of the free market.
Incentives, how do they work?
Wonder how much unions and other special interests also spend?
Articles like this one, without mentioning these other lobbying groups, feed the narrative that it is only the corporate world that spends money looking to influence policy and regulation.
The issue is not the spending, but the fact that the growing scope of government is such that lobbying becomes a profitable competitive advantage, and a lever for others to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The only solution is to reduce the scope and size of government rather than reduce / limit free expression.