Why is the federal government giving money to groups that lobby the federal government? This defies common sense. It is, however, a neat deal for those involved–legislators get money for their political campaigns in return for channeling federal money to the organizations that sponsor the Political Action Committees (PAC) that give them the money. It’s a good deal if you are part of it, and a bad deal for America and American taxpayers.

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article yesterday about this practice.

The article points out the insanity of what is going on:

Latest lobbying disclosure documents indicate Planned Parenthood spends at least $2 million a year directly lobbying Congress and state legislatures. And this year, as PP fights to retain its umbilical cord — no pun intended — to the Federal Treasury, the number’s going way up.

But the official lobbying expenditures don’t include tens of millions of other political spending. According to a recent analysis by Conservative News Service, “Planned Parenthood’s affiliates spent $26 million on public policy this past year, while the national office spent $31.3 million on building ‘advocacy capacity.'”

The mission of all this spending? The answer is obvious: to persuade Congress to continue to provide the organization with federal tax dollars.

So what we have here is an organization that receives at least half a billion dollars a year from taxpayers, and some of that money is used to lobby Congress to give them more taxpayer money.

The icing on the cake is that the money is borrowed from Japan and China. We have to pay interest on it.

The article details the problem:

Is it any surprise that under this racket it has become almost impossible to cut the budget or to balance receipts with expenditures? This is a common practice. The unions do it. The legal public aid community does it. Welfare organizations do it.

To be fair, it isn’t just left-wing groups that receive taxpayer dollars and lobby. So do corporations. Defense contractors run lobbying campaigns year-round to persuade Congress to spend more money on this weapon or that. Companies that have received the bulk of the funding for the Export Import Bank are bankrolling the PR campaign to keep the institution from closing down.

We will never curb government spending as long as we allow this kind of abuse of our system. The problem is not lobbying–that is and should remain legal. The problem is government-supported lobbying. That is ridiculous.