In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..
Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…
Is just to pay your politicians more money.
People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.
Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.
I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.
That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.
If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost. Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level? Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…