Lobbyists spending billions to help earn trillions and other news and views for the day

• Top Spenders On Capitol Hill Pay Billions, Receive Trillions – ‘How much power should corporations wield in Washington? It’s an enduring question — and now the Sunlight Foundation has devised a new way to gauge that power. The foundation took the 200 corporations most active in Washington, analyzed the years 2007-2012 and applied several metrics: what the companies got in federal contracts and other federal support, what they spent on lobbying, how much their executives and political action committees gave in campaign contributions. Bill Allison, the Sunlight Foundation’s editorial director, says there aren’t permanent majorities governing in Congress and the executive branch — “but there really are permanent interests in Washington,” he says. With some companies, a policy of giving big to political campaigns might seem pretty obvious; at other companies, it’s less obvious. “But federal spending is a big part of their business model,” Allison says. He says the top 200 corporations accounted for nearly $6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions. Those same corporations benefited from more than $4 trillion in federal contracts and assistance.’

• A Reserve So Deep, You Could Drown – Hugh Jackman Stars in ‘The River’ on Broadway – “In Jez Butterworth’s “The River,” the poetic tease of a drama that opened Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, Mr. Jackman conveys an impression of mightily self-contained silence, even when he’s talking like Wordsworth on a bender. And in banking his fires so compellingly, he ascends with assurance to a new level as a stage actor.”
• Japan Through the Looking Glass – Paul Krugman writes: “Long ago I argued that what Japan needed was a credible promise to be irresponsible. And deficits that must be monetized are one way to make that happen … As I and other people like Paul McCulley have tried to explain many times, the liquidity trap puts you on the other side of the looking glass; virtue is vice, prudence is folly, central bank independence is a bad thing and the threat of monetized deficits is to be welcomed, not feared.”
• Why Keynes is important today – “The current debate on the efficacy of Keynesian stimulus mirrors the resistance Keynes met with when initially advocating his theory.”
• The Netherlands Is Set To Open The World’s First Solar Bike Lane
• Why are the Conservatives so incompetent at running the economy? – “If that question seems odd to you, you are one of the majority in the UK who think the Conservatives are better at managing the economy than Labour. Why do people think this? My guess is that it is very simple. The financial crisis happened while Labour was in power. This led to the largest recession since the Great Depression. But surely everyone knows that the financial crisis was a global phenomenon that started in the US? Surely everyone knows that if the Conservatives had been in power there would have been just as little financial regulation, so the impact of the crisis on UK banks would have been much the same? The problem is that most people do not know this.
• The career prospects of overeducated Americans