The Top Political Contributors

Most are unions and almost all the rest are companies or trade associations from heavily regulated industries. Health care, telecom, finance, etc.

What does that tell you?

Anyone who thinks Finance is heavily regulated is a fool. Or a neoliberal.

Of course, finance is heavily regulated. Just look at the dozen or so stately marble buildings within 5 miles of the Capitol. Or the 1,600 pages of Dodd/Frank (available at Amazon for a mere $112.87).

The interesting question is, regulated for whose benefit?

Finance is certainly "heavily" regulated - just put all the sections of the Federal Register that cover finance on a scale and you'll get some serious tonnage.

Whether it's "well" regulated is another discussion.

This list suffers from two problems. First, it looks at gross donations and ignores how political money is aggregated. If you have 4 or 5 middle-sized organizations against one larger organization, it is not clear that the one larger association it is not clear that it is dominating the direction of policy or politics more. On first glance, it seems that it lumps state, local, and national races and together and how the division of interests is different at different levels.

Secondly, it seems that it only looks at donations to candidates and ignores the "off-the-book" donations to organizations that have political consequences, such as the Koch brothers giving money to George Mason to support the Mercatus Center or Cato, Heritage, etc.

"Secondly, it seems that it only looks at donations to candidates and ignores the "off-the-book" donations to organizations that have political consequences, such as the Koch brothers giving money to George Mason to support the Mercatus Center or Cato, Heritage, etc. "

That seems to be expecting an awful lot of any bit of data. And of course, by this metric, how would we add up the billions of tuition dollars spent at many universities which are merely young progressive learning academies? Or how about how much money the governments themselves pour into various projects which have an even stronger political impact than any think tank could possibly have? Both of those flows would swamp any conceivable donation or influence list one could conjure up.

Wintercow:

If the data is so inadequate that one should not use it to suggest that the real money is all unions (as the post clearly does) from a person who clearly has an agenda (works at one of the think tanks) as if policy for the past 30 years has been driven by unions. The direction of policy alone, or counting the number of lobbyists, etc. could have given a more accurate picture, but that clearly was not the intent.

Or, you could make a blanket and untrue statement that all colleges/universities (except those with explicit missions otherwise) are just indoctrination camps, especially in economics.