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简介：Money goes in. More money comes out.

参与方式：全文听写
Hints:
Labor Department
Alex Blumberg
NPR's Planet Money team
Raquel Alexander
Kansas
NRA
Sierra Club
the American Jobs Creation Act
Some economic news, next. New unemployment numbers are out this morning, and the Labor Department says the unemployment rate fell again, slightly, to 8.5 percent. That is the lowest level in almost three years. Another survey finds employers added about 200,000 jobs. We'll have analysis through the day on NPR stations. In addition to hiring, many businesses are spending billions of dollars on lobbying this year – as in every year. Businesses could spend their money on many other things, so that raises a question: what's the payoff? Here's Alex Blumberg of NPR's Planet Money team. What you get in return for the money you spend on lobbying is a difficult question to answer with precision. We know that people lobby for a reason. We know that they're successful many times. But we haven't really been able to quantify what's the return on their lobbying investment. Raquel Alexander is a tax professor at the University of Kansas. Couple of years ago, she and her colleagues set out to answer this question. It's a tricky one because there are a lot of reasons people lobby, and you can't always put a dollar figure on what they get out of it. The NRA lobbies for gun rights. The Sierra Club lobbies for environmental issues. If they get some regulation strengthened or loosened, there's no easy way to tally up what it's worth. But in 2004, Alexander and her colleagues finally got something that could help them add up lobbying costs and benefits - the American Jobs Creation Act. This was the piece of legislation that lots of multi-national corporations spent a lot of money lobbying for, because it got them a huge one-time tax break. It allowed them to bring profits held abroad back into the country, and instead of paying the normal rate of 35 percent, they paid just over five percent.