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Prior to the Legislative Reorganization Act (LRA) of 1970, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington, DC, grew from between 200-400 in the late 1960s to approximately 13,070 by 2024!
x.com/RoleighMartin/…

If you look at the rapid rise of our nation’s debt, it was on a near-flatline (relative to the size of our economy) until the early 1970s when it spiked upward and has gotten worse ever since.

I downloaded from the US Fiscal Treasury Data of the Historical Debt Outstanding into a spreadsheet and looked at the data since 1/1/1790. 80 times since 1790 through 1957, those adults in Congress passed a budget surplus that survived the full year of the budget and entering into the next year, where the nation recorded a lower outstanding debt. Congress has not done this once since 1957.

In the 20th century, up until 1957, Congress reduced the nation’s prior year debt by an average of 3.53% 17 times!

To reduce the fiscal year 2024 debt by 3.53% (that early 20th century average surplus amount), government spending needs to be reduced by $3.154 Trillion!

In the 19th century, Congress reduced the nation’s prior year debt by an average of 12.21% 59 times! The normal Congress in the 19thcentury was reducing the nation’s debt when they held a year-long session of Congress!

Note, some readers, including Grok, are under the mistaken belief that under Clinton, the national debt was reduced around 2001.

It wasn’t and even though in political BS terminology the budget was balanced (it wasn’t in any private sector accounting framework), Grok explains its own confusion (blame it on xAI’s refusal to let Grok update its knowledge base during conversations) and admits 1957 was the last year Congress reduced the national debt. The X Article gives the link to that Grok conversation.

The evidence that the 1970 LRA act is hugely responsible is overwhelming.

In a conversation with X’s AI, Grok, of all the “audits” conducted by outside research firms on Congressional failure, one research organization, privately funded, meets the “Occam’s Razor” elegance of providing a Root Cause Analysis.

Occam’s Razor (also spelled Ockham’s Razor) is a heuristic or philosophical principle. Named after the 14th-century English philosopher William of Ockham, it states that among competing hypotheses or explanations, the one with the fewest assumptions or the simplest explanation should be preferred, all else being equal.

Grok found only one Congressional “audit” research organization, which is the Congressional Research Institute, that has the elegance of Occam’s Razor and reveals the following features:

A. A Root Cause Analysis explains what happened exactly in the early 1970s to cause a graphically visible growth in the outstanding national debt.

B. It explains the sudden rapid growth of lobbyists from around 300 since the late 1960s to now over 13,000 per Statista as of 2024.

C. It explains the surprising expansion from 2,000 pages of legislation per year to now churning out more than 7,000 pages (as of 2019).

D. It explains why a budget that reduces the outstanding national debt has not happened.

E. It explains why the growth of the runaway debt is in a sharp “S” curve ascendency.

None of the presented alternative “audits” or “investigations of Congress”, to me, approach an Occam Razor’s Root Cause Analysis of Congress.

The best research is that done by the Congressional Research Institute, which is privately funded. Their landmark 2019 report is reviewed. It explains why Congress became controllable (captured) by external forces with the passage of the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act.

Read this article to not only understand more about Congress, about when transparency is productive versus counter-productive, about lobbyists, how they use executive office agency regulators too (instead of approaching legislators directly), and how the current state of Grok hinders the spread of correct historical Information to users of Grok.

https://x.com/roleighmartin/status/1908940825649619183?s=46&t=f_8PqEXFBlW87QFKb_1Q4g