They have influence on government because they pay politicians bribes that get them elected. Endless evidence to support that where companies or industries give money, politicians get elected, and politicians pass laws to give those companies benefits they want that aren't good for voters or even the voters money. The politicians get wealth and power in return. End of story.
The rest is narrative the politicians use to distract from that. Now, they do like bringing jobs and contracts into their districts to increase their votes. They operate on money, though. Recent example with ISP's:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp...
The oil companies make it even more obvious. They're making insane profits but still get tax subsidies from the politicians they paid off.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/12/us-taxpa...
It’s quite simple, with financial power comes political power. Elections cost a lot of money these days and if you look at the donor list of both parties it’s dominated by large corporations.
Edit: a more useful metric will be the percentage of total revenue paid by corporations. As can be seen the tax rate is misleading.
The government doesn't "permit" outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Thanks to the technology created by folks here on HN, there is nothing the government can really do if IBM decides to fire a worker in New York and hire one in Bangalore. The only thing the government can really do is offer concessions and incentives to reduce the bleeding.
> It’s quite simple, with financial power comes political power. Elections cost a lot of money these days and if you look at the donor list of both parties it’s dominated by large corporations.
The party that spent the most money just lost the most recent major election, so I'm not convinced money really matters much. In reality, we spend a minuscule amount on politics given the size of the country. About 0.0037% of GDP on Presidential elections, and 0.019% of GDP on lobbying. For context, we spend less on lobbying each year than we do on specialty coffee.
If money really bought elections, companies would spend a lot more of it trying to do so.
This scholarly study found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.“
Hardly a surprising fact. Polls show most Americans believe the government is dominated by a small group of special interests who are looking out for themselves.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Even the threat of money buys politicians. Case in point: the repeal of Obamacare is wildly unpopular with the US public, but the Koch brothers got a majority of the house of representatives to vote for it. How? Simple: they threatened that any GOP representative who voted against it, would face a primary opponent in their district next year with $millions in funding. They don't even have to spend the millions (although they do), because simply the threat of a well funded primary challenger is enough for them to buy votes.
It's a great tragedy that the supreme court has effectively taken our democracy away from us by ruling that money is speech, and protected by the first amendment.
Also, you’ve got it backwards about Citizens United. The Supreme Court didn’t rule that money is speech. Instead, detractors are trying to convince people that speech (the case was about a political movie) is actually money.
And this is one of the many reasons I despise the UK currently (I'm British). The citizenry do not benefit from these arrangements. If anything people seem to becoming more aware of it and more pissed off about it.
I love how the UK likes to torpedo any EU attempt to overhaul and address these greedy little sweetheart deals as well.
Comparing the corporate tax rate in 1952 to today is pointless. In 1952, the U.K. was a shell burned out from WWII. Today, it's a tax haven luring American companies to reincorporate there. You cannot fight this process with legislation--you'll just shoot yourself in the foot and drive companies out to other countries that will be happy to receive them. This isn't just a U.S. thing--even accounting for deductions and tax breaks, the U.S. has higher corporate tax rates than our competitor countries: http://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the-.... The "real" amount of taxes paid in the U.S. is about 18.6%, versus 8.5% for Canada, 11.2% for France, and 4.1% for South Korea.