On 7/24, a story ran about Dodd-Frank where Amy Friend illustrates pigs feeding at the troughs, even the very ones they’ve built.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/07/dodd-franks-winners-revolving-door-regulators
This story addresses the same issue at a macro level. American public loves to rail against lobbying while hailing the regulations that enable it. There’s no coincidence lobbying escalated over the past decade and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank passed. During the dot com boom, tech industry focused more of its investment in products and personnel. After the Microsoft anit-trust trials, they now spend on lobbying. Tax dollars leave states to the federal government, and the states have to grovel to get those dollars back. State legislators even have lobbying representation! These circumstances call for state to do more while the federal government does less with respect to taxing and regulating. This also has a role in solving our debt crisis because states can’t print money. They have to balance their budgets. This way, conservative locales could have the regulations and taxing they want while liberal locales could respectively have the same, and we could all happily coexists with less lobbying related gridlock in
Washington.
