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On April 12, 2017, former Boeing CEO Jim McNerney sat down in the West Wing with President Trump. Trump had, on the campaign trail, advocated abolishing the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that typically subsidizes $10 billion a year in Boeing exports.

On April 13, Trump announced he would fill out Ex-Im's board of directors, thus reviving the agency's ability to subsidize Boeing's overseas customers.

This was a replay from eight years earlier.

Candidate Barack Obama had called Ex-Im "little more than a slush fund for corporate welfare." Obama soon picked McNerney and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as his manufacturing czar and jobs czar, respectively. GE is arguably Ex-Im's No. 2 beneficiary. Obama quickly came around on the agency, and became Ex-Im's most important ally in Washington.

Access to the White House is extremely valuable for corporations, regardless of who the president is. Everyone in Washington knows this, and now two scholars have confirmed and quantified the profitability to companies of access to the White House.

In President Obama's most impressive act of transparency, he published, regularly throughout his tenure, his White House visitor logs. Jeffrey Brown and Jiekun Huang of the University of Illinois studied those logs from Obama's first month through the end of 2015, and found 2,286 White House meetings between Obama officials and executives of the companies included in the S&P 1,500.

The researchers found two notable things about the companies that made up these 2,286 meetings: That money helped the executives get in the door, and getting in the door helped them make money.

The first finding could be put this way: Access could be bought through campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

"We find that firms that contributed more to Obama's presidential election campaigns are more likely to have access to the White House. We also find that firms that spend more on lobbying, firms that receive more government contracts, larger firms, and firms with a greater market share are more likely to have access to influential federal officials."

Second, they found that access was profitable.

"Corporate executives' meetings with White House officials are followed by significant positive cumulative abnormal returns." That term, "cumulative abnormal returns," in this case basically means how much the stock in question outperformed the S&P 1500 index over the 10 days before and the 30 days after the meeting. "We also find that the result is driven mainly by meetings with the President and his top aides. We find insignificant CARs for canceled visits, suggesting that the actual incidence of the meetings matters for firm value."

Why would a meeting drive up the stock of a company? The authors posit three mechanisms: A meeting could secure a government contract, it could help line up regulatory relief, or it could simply provide inside information that is valuable to a company.

I would add many more ways access to government is profitable. For instance, Boeing's access to the Obama and Trump White Houses seem to have secured support for a subsidy program that has nothing to do with government contracts.

Also, regulatory relief isn't always what companies seek. Google had amazing access to the Obama White House. Google "Internet Evangelist" (definitely not a lobbyist) Vint Cerf served on an Obama board. Google's former top lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin was a top White House official on tech policy, and he traded emails with current Google lobbyists who were supporting the White House's push to further regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality. Here, corporate access to Obama's White House advanced more regulation which would protect Google's current business model.

The researchers had another intriguing finding: "firms with access to the Obama administration experience significantly lower stock returns following the release of the election result than otherwise similar firms."

In other words, their investment in Democrats became a money loser when Trump took over.

For a cynic in Washington, or even just a close observer, there's no surprise in these conclusions. Of course money buys access, and of course access to politicians is valuable. But there's plenty to learn from this study.

First, some people actually believed that Obama had changed Washington and stopped the cash-for-influence game. This study doesn't compare Obama to other presidents, but it shows that the game was alive and well under Obama.

Second, it makes Obama's transparency in this one regard even more laudable. The visitor logs made this study possible and so it showed the country how Washington works. For this reason, especially since Trump has said he won't follow Obama's lead here, Congress should mandate regular and thorough reporting of White House Visitor Logs.

A final lesson: Since big business clearly has more access to government, then bigger government equals a bigger advantage for big business. If government played a smaller role in industry, access wouldn't be so valuable, and the playing field would be more level.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were both correct that the game is rigged in favor of the big guys. This new study helps us see how big government is the rigger.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.

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Study documents how profitable access to Obama's White House was - Washington Examiner

Update: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has now called Obama's $400,000 speaking feetroubling. "I was troubled by that," she told SiriusXM's Radio Andy on Thursday.

And later Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called it "unfortunate" -- twice.

The below post, which mentions Warren's past criticism of Obama's handling of Wall Street, is from Wednesday.

Former president Barack Obama reemerged this week for his first formal public event since leaving office, but all people can talk about isa future event specifically, one for which he will be paid his old annual salary for one speech.

News broke Monday that Obama would be paid one of those exorbitant speaker's fees that Hillary Clinton received: $400,000 for speaking at aWall Street conference put on by the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Obama's situation is not the same as Clinton's, in that he cannot run for president again. So taking Wall Street's money, at this point, won't directly affect official U.S. policy that Obama will pursue in the future. Nor is there any rule prohibiting him from receiving the money.

But that doesn't mean the arrangement isn't problematic especially these daysand especially for Obama and his party. Below are a few reasons Obama may want to rethink his decision.

1. It continues to set a dubious precedent

As mentioned above, there is no rule against Obama doing this. None. But there is the precedent that it sets or rather, continues to set.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did this, too, as have Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. And the more that Wall Street firms give out-of-office presidents and big-name politicians these paydays, the more they become the norm. Other presidents will know that such payments are on the table, and it risks coloring their decisions with regard to Wall Street and special interests.

Which is already happening with Obama, retroactively. Liberals loved (and miss) his presidency, but if there's one thing the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing is still sore aboutin the Obama administration, it's the lack of prosecutions for anybody involved in the financial crisis. In September, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, requested a formal investigation of why no charges were brought.

And here's Warren in a 2014 interview with Salon:

WARREN: At the same time, picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street.

SALON: You might say always. Just about every time they had to compromise, they compromised in the direction of Wall Street.

WARREN: Thats right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes.

Whether fair or not, it's not difficult to look at Wall Street paying $400,000 to Obama as a reward for that. In that way, it's tough on both precedent and Obama's presidency.

2. We have other rules against retroactively cashing in

It's not as though the idea of holding office and then benefiting from it at a later date is a completely novel one. The Trump administration, the Obama administration and Congress have all instituted lobbying bans on their employees, limiting their ability to lobby government after leaving government usually for years.

These bans aren't written because those aides may one day rejoin government and be influenced by having been made wealthy by certain special interests; they're written because it became so normal for former aides to cash inafterward and basically use their government jobs for a future payday on behalf of well-heeled special interests. The prospect of future wealth became a given.

3. Democrats are trying to be the anti-Wall Street party

This whole thing comes at a somewhat inauspicious time for the Democratic Party: Just as Democrats' true identity is in flux, as Sanders's anti-Wall Street messageseems to beascendant, and as President Trump at times co-opted that message in the 2016 election.

That brand of populism clearly has very broad appeal, and now Democrats are being put in the position of deciding whether their former president should take $400,000 from Wall Street for a speech. At the least, it risks suggesting the party's anti-Wall Street posture is in some cases just that posturing.

4. Obama himself discussed the corrupting influenceof such arrangements in his book

Jonathan Cohn tweeted something Wednesday morning that I thought was really interesting. There is actually a section in Obama's 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, that describes the subtle, corrupting influence of arrangements like this.

Here's an excerpt. It's long, but it's worth digesting:

I cant assume that the money chase didnt alter me in some ways.

Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate.

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts theyd received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population that is, the people that Id entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.

And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you dont want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you havent changed Washington, and youve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance of fundraisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders dont quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes.

Obama is talking about politicians who are in office, yes, but he's also talking about how special interests get their hooks in you without you really being conscious of it. He's talking about how taking special-interest money is the easy way out. And that sure seems applicable to today.

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Sanders and Warren are criticizing Obamas $400,000 Wall ...

So much has already been said about Barack Obamas speaking fees.

So much except for the one thing that should actually matter.

Barack and Michelle Obama are residents of Washington, D.C., which means they are subject to the Districts income taxes. Those top out at 8.95%.

They will, of course, also be subject to the far heavier federal tax rate, which tops out at 39.6%.

It is dollars to donuts that the former president and first lady will be in the highest income brackets. That means each dollar of extra income will be subject to a combined marginal rate of tax of about 45% (its not 49% because the D.C. tax, which is deductible, should reduce the federal tax) .

So to put this in terms that even haters can understand, when Obama gives a speech and gets paid $400,000, he generates $180,000 in taxes, most of it federal.

Not bad for what is, when you include speechwriting, preparation and travel, probably a few days work.

Lets be even clearer.

A first-year private in the U.S. Army earns $18,700. So Obamas one speech to Wall Street will pay the salaries of 10 of them for the year. (OK, for simplicitys sake Im ascribing all his tax to the federal level. This is merely an illustration. You can run numbers based on Washington police officers, local services or whatever).

Or, the Kaiser Foundation calculates that Medicaids annual bill for a recipient with disabilities is $16,643. So Obama just paid the full years Medicaid bill for 11 people with disabilities.

Or, to put it another way, the average Pell grant to help kids with college works out to $3,724, according to the College Board. So Obamas speech just paid for a full years Pell grants for 48 kids.

No doubt this was what right-wing gadfly Dinesh DSouza was talking about when he tweeted, about Obamas fees, His service to the poor and needy continues.

(DSouza is always right, by the way. For example, his movie 2016: Obamas America correctly predicted last years massive financial collapse.)

Actually, Obama is giving two speeches for $800,000, so we have to double everything. With those two speeches hes paying for 20 soldiers, or 22 people with disabilities, or 96 Pell grants.

Naturally this is true of all earners, especially high earners, regardless of politics.

Ive said it before and Ill say it again. We dont have a right-wing (or left-wing) problem in this country. We have a facts and logic problem. Grown men and women think, talk and act in ways that would have earned a 10-year old an F where I went to school.

Dont get me started on right-wingers complaining that Obama is charging the market rate for his services.

Or on left-wingers complaining that someone who pays the top rate of income tax has gone out and earned lots of money. Er... how else did they expect to pay for programs?

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren says she is troubled by Obamas speaking fee. Naturally. She may run for president in 2020, and she knows that a good chunk of the votes are controlled by angry people who dont understand economics.

So it would probably be rude of me to point out that when she was at Harvard, she billed them $326,000 a year in compensation or roughly the cost of 88 Pell grants.

Also read: Elizabeth Warren says Obama got it wrong: Its worse than Americans realize

Excerpt from:
Opinion: Thanks, Obama How his $400000 speaking fee actually helps America - MarketWatch

New York Times

Florida Deal Would Reverse Key Part of Obama's Medicaid Expansion New York Times The Obama administration balked at providing more money to help hospitals cope with the costs of uncompensated care for people who could be covered by Medicaid. If Florida expanded Medicaid eligibility, the Obama administration said, fewer people ... and more »

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Florida Deal Would Reverse Key Part of Obama's Medicaid Expansion - New York Times

Former President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaReport: Trump tweeted 470 times in first 99 days Biden schedule sets off 2020 speculation Obama makes 0K for speech at A&E event: report MORE reportedly made $400,000 for an appearance and interview last week at an A&E Networks advertising event.

The former president was interviewed at The Pierre Hotel in Midtown Manhattan by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, The New York Postreported. The History Makers event, which lasted 90 minutes, was conducted in front of the cable network's advertisers and hosted by A&E chief Nancy Dubac.

During the event, the former president was asked what he missed most about the White House and how he dealt with frustrating moments when he was president.

A source who attended told the Post that Obama said he missed sitting on the Truman Balcony of the White House in the summer and looking upon the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

He also told the audience about his transition back into civilian life, saying he still hasnt drive a car and is learning how to use the coffee machine in his new D.C. home.

Obama has faced criticism recently, after a report that he agreed to speak at a Wall Street firm's healthcare conference for $400,000.

He will appear at the Cantor Fitzgerald LP conference in September.

Sen. Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenObama makes 0K for speech at A&E event: report Van Jones: Obama should do poverty tour Warren reads middle school students' letters on climate change MORE (D-Mass.) last week said she was "troubled" by the speaking fee the former president is reportedly receiving for that appearance.

Sen. Bernie SandersBernie SandersObama makes 0K for speech at A&E event: report Van Jones: Obama should do poverty tour Sanders calls for renewed focus on fighting climate change MORE (I-Vt.) alsoexpressed disappointment in the former president's decision.

"I think at a time when people are so frustrated with the power of Wall Street and the big-money interests, I think it is unfortunate that President Obama is doing this," Sanders said last week.

"Wall Street has incredible power, and I would have hoped that the president would not have given a speech like this," he added.

A spokesman for Obama rejected the idea that Wall Street would sway Obama, pointing to the financial reforms implemented during his time in office.

"With regard to this or any speech involving Wall Street sponsors, I'd just point out that in 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since [former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt]," Eric Schultz said in a statement.

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Obama makes $400K for speech at A&E event: report - The Hill