The Washington Post reports on a new study by Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen Mazza, and Susan Scholz that quantified returns on a lobbying effort to enact a single tax break in 2004. The one-time change to the tax code benefited 800 companies, allowing researchers to go back and look at how much the various beneficiaries spent to push the change. The found that the legislation "earned companies $220 for every dollar they spent on the issue -- a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investment." "The study by researchers at the University of Kansas underscores the central reason that lobbying has become a $3 billion-a-year industry in Washington: It pays." (Via Marginal Revolution.)
