NPR新聞:無(wú)視股票債券，給說(shuō)客投資吧（2/3）

So we found 450 firms, that reported in their financial statement, that they were taking advantage of this tax holiday to bring money back home. And of those, 93 we identified as being involved in lobbying. Alexander and her colleagues compared the amounts these firms spent lobbying with the amount they saved on their taxes, and came up with a figure - a figure they called The Return on Investment to Lobbying. Now, return on investment is a term you may have heard: how much do I get back in return when I put my money somewhere. Money in a regular old savings account, you'd be lucky to get a one percent return on investment. On the other end of the spectrum, Bernard Madoff advertised annual returns of just over 10 percent. So, if you want to come up with a big, impressive-sounding lie, a 10 percent return on investment is what you say. The Return on Investment to Lobbying, in the case of Alexander's study... Twenty-two thousand percent; so for every dollar, on average, that these firms spend on tax lobbying, they received $220 in tax benefits from this repatriation provision. Were you expecting it to be that big? I was not. I was not expecting it to be that big at all. I thought I needed to go back and check my math again. So, after the fifth or sixth time checking you were like, oh, this is the number. After the 20th time of checking. There were $3.5 billion spent on lobbying in 2010, and it's hard to imagine that every one of those dollars got a 22,000 percent return. There are certainly companies out there that spent a lot of money and didn't get what they wanted, they just lost the money. But Raquel Alexander says that since that tax holiday passed in 2004, the amount of corporate profits held in offshore tax havens has tripled.