Well, $1 from you and 100 other people. Those politician bribes campaign donations are cheap compared to the aggregate profit they make off them.
Its always baffled me how corporations managed to bribe politicians but its legal because they use the term “lobbying” instead.
Imagining murdering someone then saying nope thats not a crime, simply because you won’t call it a homicide, instead you keep labeling it something else.
Or another example, i’m not allowed to “lobby” a police officer out of giving me a ticket, but a mining corporation can lobby away their environmental regulations.
It’s another reason we need term limits. The accumulated power and influence a representative has gained needs to be checked.
Youre forgetting they get to decide what the excel looks like. Even if it costs them 5$ per person to get 1$ from them, all they need to show is the excel with employee costs going down to call it profit. The expenses paid out to friends and politicians “need to be spent anyway” so it’s not reallt “a loss”.
You should see the P&L of these companies and how they twist themselves into knots making the line go up
