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One of the impressive things about American democracy is just how cheap it is to buy politicians. To use the numbers from this article, Odebrecht spent $439 million to secure contracts whose profit totalled $1.4 billion, while in the US you could probably have done it legally for less than a million or two.

$10,000 is still big money for a US Rep, $50k will easily buy you a senator.

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As an example: Joel Myers of Accuweather and his brother donated $11,000 to Rick Santorum (a senator) shortly before he introduced the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005, whose "effect would be to eliminate public dissemination of National Weather Service data and forecasts except in case of severe weather alerts. [...] The bill had very few supporters outside the commercial weather industry" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Dutie...).

If a US politician can be substantially influenced by $10-50k - how many reasonably well paid Bay Area software engineers could be out actively buying influence using nothing but their personal salary?

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