Lee Drutman is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation is on the growth of corporate lobbying in Washington, DC. In 2008-2009 he was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The Obama administration is continuing its troubling zero-tolerance and zero-nuance policy for lobbyists. In so doing, it is both misunderstanding the problem of lobbying and missing an opportunity for a meaningful solution.
For all of pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s efforts, bonuses on Wall Street show no signs of slowing. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase & Co. (all of which have paid back their TARP obligations) are reportedly paying $30 billion in bonuses this year.
There is a very simple reason that people on Wall Street are making so much money and will continue to do so, no matter what pay cuts are imposed. It is because there is still so much money to be made.
Thanks to Gordon Brown’s support, the idea of a financial transaction tax has been gaining a bit of attention over the last couple of weeks. The idea is simple: place a small tax (say, 0.25 percent or less) on all financial transactions.
