Save Lobbyists Cash

How much does a Congressional Committee Cost?  It is a simple enough question, but Lobbyists are confounded by it.

But, now, we know.

It's $22.8 million.

The very amount financial lobbyists have rammed down the collective throat of the Senate Agriculture Committee. 

The what?

Well, technically, it can now be called the Committee on Agriculture, Financial Nutrition and Can't See the Forestry. But, yes, them.

This (or some of it) is according to the New York Times article by Ed Wyatt (Old French for "Where at") and Eric Lightblau (Old German for "KMart bargain").

If you think that odd, Ed and Eric have a better one: Those dollars are Two and a Half as much as Charlie Sheen has spent getting into rehab and a similar multiple of what the Committee members have reaped from the guys who give us soybeans and Wheaties, the guys who are supposed to buying the Committee lunches and golf clubs.

So that's the however-weird reaping part.  What about the sowing?  Shouldn't that come first?  Well, in politics, the committee member's reaping is really the lobbyist's sowing, keeping the whole harvesting metaphor lucratively intact for all.

Apparently, the Democrats' Twelve Agri Men (okay, and women) get to decide whether derivatives should (1) be allowed to grow wild, as done under the Republicans; (2) be intelligently regulated, as not done under the Democrats; or (3) simply be exiled back to Calculus where they can boggle students minds because the needed symbols are not available for texting.

Idiotic?  A word usually too hackneyed when tied to Congress, but, here, go ahead.

Once upon a time, Agriculture was more important than either Tweeting or securities fraud.  Farmed commodities were the first to be subject to futures trading, mostly in the relatively sane city of Chicago.  Regulating such made-ups things based on real things, like carloads of pork bellies or corn on the cob, fell, sort of logically, to the Agriculture Committee. 

Sometime after the cocaine was taken out of colas and put in rolled hundred dollar bills, Wall Street decided made-up things could be based on other made-up things, like a mathematician's idea of a hedge fund's bet against sub-prime mortgage nano-interests. The Agricultural Committee couldn't see anything that needed regulating, since there was nothing but air to see.  And they don't get to regulate that.

We know where that got us and some of us would like not to go there again anytime soon.

Hence, 22.8 million buys the financial lobby a committee they don't really want, but have to have, because some of us are still fussing over 2008.

Seem like a waste?

All those committee people.  All that money.  The solution is fewer and, therefore, less.  Or really fewer and a lot less.  Pay each committee member a half a mil each, even the Republicans (though that is optional).  That comes to, at most, $10.5 million.  Ship them, first class, to Idaho for a well-deserved, but unpaid vacation, generous at $100,000.  Sit a single financial lobbyist behind twenty-one cardboard cut-outs, costing $10 each, but allow $200,000. 

The lobbyist gets the draft bill via email from Wall Street as usual, prints it out, say in Icelandic to see if anyone notices, and sends it in boxes to the floor of the Senate.  And saves twelve million bucks which could be donated to Iceland's derivative-busted banks, since we used their language on the bill or could be used to compensate the blogger who came up with the idea in the first place.

Billions in lost time, productivity and sanity avoided.

Oh.  And those committee members?  They won't be coming back from Idaho.