In Bed With Business
ANDY ROONEY

©2005 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

It is commonly accepted as fact that Big Business is at war with Big Gov-ernment.

I would like to say, in a nice, quiet, polite way that this is horse manure. Big Business is in business with Big Government. They are best friends. Too often they exclude the rest of us from their behind-the-scenes dealings. We don’t know what goes on.

About half the people who leave government jobs, including those who served in Congress, go to work for more money as lobbyists. They work for ma-jor corporations trying (often suc-cessfully) to influence the decisions of the government agencies they left. For some of them, being elected to Congress or getting a government job is just a stepping stone to a job as lobbyist with higher pay. The pay for U.S. Represen-tatives and Senators is $157,000. The starting salary for a lobbyist with any connections in government is around $300,000 now. There are currently 34,700 registered lobbyists in Washing-ton.

The popular concept is that Demo-crats favor more government and Re-publicans want less, but there are no fewer government employees now than there were under President Clinton. Not only are there as many people in government as there ever were, but the number of workers actually paid by the government is tiny compared to the legions in Washington paid from government funds through private com-panies with contracts for government work.

Government spending in Washing-ton increased by a whopping 30 percent between 2000 and 2004 to a re-cord $2.29 trillion. (Writing about big bucks, I always feel obliged to say that one billion is 1,000 million. One trillion is 1,000 billion.)

One of the bad things about the power of lobbyists to influence the laws under which businesses operate, is that the biggest corporations with the most money can afford to pay the most in-fluential lobbyists to get things their way. The little guys in small companies who don’t have a million to pay an in-fluence peddler are squeezed out. The big get bigger; the rich get richer.

The huge salaries made by lobbyists are a temptation many legislators can’t resist. Lobbying companies and trade associations trying to influence government decisions in their favor offer former government officials millions to work for them. Marc Racicot, who made $75,000 as governor of Mon-tana and then became head of the Re-publican National Committee, is go-ing to get a million dollars a year as president of a lobbying firm euphe-mistically called “the American Insu-rance Association.” Former Represen-tative Robert Livingston of Louisiana was chairman of the House Appropri-ations Committee. He knows where the money is buried. Livingston is now president of a thriving lobbying company.

If you think it’s only Republicans who are digging in this lobbying gold mine, note that former Vice President and one-time head Democrat Al Gore joined the Board of Directors of Apple Computer for an undisclosed salary which was probably too embarrassingly big to be disclosed. You can bet it was 10 times the $175,000 he got as Vice President. Gore is valuable to Apple because he had a lot to do with getting most classrooms and libraries in the United States wired into the Internet. He knows the ropes. Don’t be surprised in the future if Apple muscles in as the system-of-choice.

Lobbying is a Washington tradition most of us don’t like or understand. I, for example, do not like or understand why the American Ambulance Association pays $300,000 a year to a lobbying company. I’m sure, though, that they get their money back and we pay it when we call an ambulance.

Last year, Hewlett-Packard paid lob-byists $734,000 trying to get Repub-licans to pass legislation that would allow the company to pay a lot less tax on the $14 billion they made in profits from foreign companies they own. I wouldn’t want to have to explain it to a class of eighth graders, but if a company pays Chinese workers 35 cents an hour and sells what they make in the United States as if they had paid the workers $25 an hour, the company makes a lot of money.

If I ever give up writing for a living, I may become a lobbyist. I’ll get Con-gress to pass a law paying old writers $300,000 a year not to write anything in order to give younger writers a better chance.

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