Well, this explains a lot. No wonder Pennsylvania legislators were so removed from voters that they expected to get away with the Midnight Pay Heist of 2005, even as they did almost nothing about pressing issues like property tax reform, health care for the state's 3.4 million uninsured residents and raising the minimum wage.

After all, taxpayers were spending only about $70,000 a year on each of our 253 lawmakers' base pay. Meanwhile, lobbyists in the Senate -- the only state body with a disclosure requirement -- were spending upward of $1.4 million per senator in the first half of 2005 alone.

That money -- $67.8 million over a six-month span (the amount is certainly much higher, but more on that later) -- was invested by lobbyists to get their clients' interests front and center on the lawmakers' dockets.

It paid for the salaries of the lobbyists and their research staffs who wrote the bills they wanted to see enacted. It paid for the offices they inhabit and the equipment therein. It paid for the materials they produced and mailed in support of their issues, the print and broadcast ads they placed to sway public opinion and urge people to pressure their lawmakers. It paid for the campaigns they conducted on the Internet.

Lastly, it paid for the meals and gifts that go directly to the legislators. And while those are the expenditures that the public tends to decry most, they are not the keys to the kingdom, according to Barry Kauffman, director of Common Cause/Pennsylvania.

"Only a small portion is devoted to gifts," Mr. Kauffman said. "It's true some organizations have lavish entertaining budgets, and the purpose is to establish preferential relationships with public officials that you can cash in on when you need them. Lawmakers aren't any different than you and me. People who treat us nicely and who we see regularly have the greatest ability to influence us. But those things are just grease for the gears.

"The heart and soul of lobbying is doing the research, having your people on the floor of the Capitol every day pounding home their points and setting the agenda. It's maintaining the structure in Harrisburg so that you're in place and ready to go. It's all the stuff you can pull out at the last minute when crunch time hits."

Mr. Kauffman cited gambling as an example.

"The people of Pennsylvania were not calling their legislators begging to spend money on casinos," he said. "But once it was on the agenda" -- the gambling lobby reported spending $10.7 million from January 2003 to June 2005 -- "it consumed enormous amounts of time that was not available for other issues you might care about like health care and education."

No wonder mere citizens couldn't seem to get lawmakers' attention.

The lobbying machinery is why Common Cause opposes term limits. If lawmakers turn over every few years, lobbyists would own all the institutional knowledge. They'd be the permanent power structure, and elected officials would simply be the dancers to their tunes.

"This is why it's good that legislators have substantial staff, so lawmakers aren't at the exclusive mercy of information provided by lobbyists," Mr. Kauffman said. "They customize information to put their best foot forward on their issues, so it's good to have enough legislative staff to glean the whole picture."

Back to that $67.8 million -- remember, that only represents what lobbyists spent on the Senate. Incredibly, no other part of state government -- not the House, not the governor's office, not state agencies or public authorities -- is required to report one bit of information about lobbying activities. As a result, they don't.

If they did, citizens could connect the dots behind every tax break, every initiative and piece of legislation. That could be bad for hidden agendas, secret deals and back-room horse trades.

What do these guys have to hide, and why are we paying you to hide it from us? House Speaker John Perzel, R-Philadelphia, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that such disclosures are unnecessary, that nobody cares about lobbyist spending except the news media. Of course, Mr. Perzel also said his neatly engineered pay raise was a closed subject until public outrage forced him to reopen it.

And about that pay raise -- the magnitude of the lobbying investment shows how little difference it would have made to the peoples' business if the 16 percent to 34 percent increases had gone forward. No salaries funded by beleaguered taxpayers could compete with those millions for getting lawmakers' attention.

This isn't to say that all our officials have only their own interests at heart. Many undoubtedly would do more of the people's business if the incentives were in place. Purging the system of its big-money influences is the long-term goal. In the short term, we need to be able to follow the money.