The other form of subsidy is of course the revolving door: legislative staffers are often poorly paid but highly intelligent and credentialed people, who would like to make money one day like the dumb fratboys they went to college with who are now at Goldman Sachs. And so the lure of lobbying beckons.

What to do about the legislative subsidy?

It seems to me that the obvious answer is to pay elected representatives and their staffs vast amounts of money.

Legislators crave the legislative subsidy simply because they don't have the staff to research whether proposed tax X would really kill eleventy zillion jobs. Legislative chiefs of staff are "owned" by Abramoff as soon as he tells them he has a job for them in several years because they're getting paid a pittance.

What if every member of Congress had a, say, $20 million staff-and-research budget? What if a congressional chief of staff made $1 million per year, and what if each congressman had an army of staffers to research policy and draft bills, as opposed to a skeleton staff? The legislative subsidy would just become irrelevant. Or at least, congresspeople would be on equal footing vis-à-vis well-funded lobbyists. And the cost would be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal budget -- and even less compared to the social and economic cost of carveouts and tax breaks.

This system could be abused: the budgets could become slush funds or patronage tools. Some rules (e.g., no spouses) can be drawn up, and maybe we could appoint an external auditor and some sort of review body made up of federal judges to punish abuses. Certainly the current system seems pretty rife with abuse, and if legislative subsidy really is the problem -- as I think it is -- this seems like a straightforward and effective solution.

You can follow me on Twitter here.