Well, not all of lobbying effort can be shockingly cheap. Referring to a quote attributed to Eric Schmidt from a sibling comment: > "The average American doesn

Well, not all of lobbying effort can be shockingly cheap. Referring to a quote attributed to Eric Schmidt from a sibling comment: > "The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists" You need lawyers for that, and that's certainly not going to be cheap. I don't think it's even remotely possible to do that with the $20m quoted in the article. If a company employs 3 lawyers full-time to work on some lobbying effort/issue XYZ, are their costs reflected in those $20m? What if they hire external lawyers? And that's just the legal side. I can think of all kinds of ancillary costs to lobbying, that it total wouldn't fit an annual budget of $20m. Not even close.