From the Washington Post: Capital gains: Spending on contracts and lobbying propels a wave of new wealth in D .C.

For our look at money in politics available to people who know the inside game:

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

. . . big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.