Apple and Political Spending Link

Interesting breakdown of political spending by tech companies.

To understand Apple’s efforts at persuading legislators of various issues, I compiled a measure of political footprint which combines a company’s own federally registered lobbying expenditures from 2015 with the campaign contributions they made during the 2013-14 election cycle from their corporate PAC as well as any employees who made campaign campaign contributions (and listed their employer). This data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Not to give away the punchline but Apple is an outlier, which matters in this situation. Sadly, this is how the system works:

“At a minimum it makes it more difficult for politicians to criticize you when they have taken money from you,” says political scientist Michael Ensley.