BusinessWeek tallies payoff from lobbying

BusinessWeek notes that, while scrutiny of federal earmarks and corporate lobbying has intensified recently,"no one outside the lobbying firms and corporate boardrooms has ever known just how much all those lobbyists bring in." Based on an analysis of nearly 2,000 earmarks that went to companies in fiscal 2005, the story by Eamon Javers estimates that, on average, companies generated roughly $28 in earmark revenue for every dollar they spent lobbying.