Law Commons^™

Business Lobbying As An Informational Public Good: Can Tax Deductions For Lobbying Expenses Promote Transparency?, Michael Halberstam, Stuart G. Lazar

Stuart Lazar

The view that “lobbying is essentially an informational activity” has persistently served the suggestion that lobbying provides a public good by educating legislators about policy and the consequences of legislation. In this article, we link a proposed tax reform with a substantive disclosure requirement to promote the kind of “information subsidy” that serves the public interest, while mitigating – at least to some extent – the distortion that may result from the imbalance of financial resources on the business side and other institutional contraints identified in the literature. We argue that corporate lobbying should be encouraged – by allowing business …