Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
Washington: Will the Lobbyists Win?
By Michael Tomasky
So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government
by Robert G. Kaiser
Knopf, 398 pp., $27.95
After the passage of the $787 billion stimulus bill in mid-February, the Obama administration entered what we might call its second phase in that month's final week, when the President spoke to a joint session of Congress on February 24 and, two days later, unveiled his first draft budget of more than $3.5 trillion. Rudolf Goldscheid, an early-twentieth-century Austrian Jewish sociologist and reformer, once said, 'The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.' Although we don't really talk that way anymore, the remark's meaning still holds true today: the budget is the document through which an administration announces just what sort of polity it envisions, and which fights it is willing to take on to realize that vision.
Review, 3927 words
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