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The title is a bit misleading at first glance: each company is setting records against previous quarters of the company itself, not compared to every other company in the US.

Honestly, this doesn't seem like big news: each company is undergoing growth and it makes sense that they're spending more on a lot of things: including lobbying.

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Totally agree, it is sort of non-news.

Now at $2M/quarter and with nearly 500 congress critters that means they are investing about $4000 per. I've always felt the PAC expense would be naturally limited by how much money could be moved into the system. Given total spending by PACs [1] on various causes I expect any member of congress can populate their re-election fund with anywhere from 1 to 8M$/year by 'listening' to their concerns.

[1] http://www.fec.gov/data/

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