I agree that this is a trope. It a factoid defined/estimated/invented by athink tank or somesuch, published somewhere and then republished lots of times citing

I agree that this is a trope. It a factoid defined/estimated/invented by athink tank or somesuch, published somewhere and then republished lots of times citing earlier publications. It's inevitaly made up, because no one (sane) publicly acknowledges that contracts won as a result of lobbying. But, I disagree with this: "An investment opportunity like that just sitting around without investors jumping on board and bidding up the price" Economists theorize using "perfect" markets like a stock or bond markets. Real life includes clunkier scenarios. An investment might be worth X to you and Y to me. It may be available to me and not to you, or worthless to you. I might be able to evaluate the value, while you can't. That doesn't mean that the roi of "investments" that aren't traded investment products will usually be in that 3%-30% range. If Apple decide to develop a new product, that is an "investment." The cost of that investment is not subject to those kinds of market forces, which ensure that high ROI investments don't exist. The ROI could be negative or it could be orders of magnitude above average. With something like "buying influence," there is no economic theory reason to expect any ROI in particular. It would be unexpected if the value of lobying was less than the cost, but otherwise it's a pretty open field.