Is Talk Cheap - Duke University.pdfVIP

“A Statesman is the animal who works with phrases instead of with the burglar’s jimmy.” “Why form a party when you can as well form a pressure group?” “Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they go.” --Some of Joseph A. Shumpeter’s aphorisms drawn from Swedberg (1991). Is Talk Cheap? * Buying Congressional Testimony with Campaign Contributions a b a Ryan Gibbs, Omer Gokcekus and Edward Tower aDuke University and bNorth Carolina Central University The Journal of Policy Reform, Volume 5, issue 3, 2002, 127-132 (lead article) April 9, 2003 Abstract: For the steel import quota bill of 1999, our answer to the question posed in the title is that each word in the Congressional Record costs $39 in campaign contributions from the steel industry. Consequently, our answer is “Yes.” JEL Classification: F13 * The authors’ emails are respectively zotch812@, ogokceku@, and tower@. For Correspondence: Omer Gokcekus, School of Business, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC 27707; Telephone: 919-530-7393, or Edward Tower, Duke University, Department of Economics, Durham, NC 27708; Telephone: 919-660-1818. Thanks go to Mike Connolly, Dave Feldman, Christof Galli, Tyler Gellasch, Mia Mikic, Olga Mossina, Ken Reinker, Pasquale Sgro and Erin Westrup for helpful comments. Is Talk Cheap? Buying Congressional Testimony with Campaign Contributions 1 INTRODUCTION Gordon Tullock (1967), in his marvelously insightful, elegantly simple and delightfully written essay “The Welfare Cost of Tariffs, Monopoly and Theft,” argues that in add