How Our Politicians Get Rich
It occurs to me regularly as to how our politicians get elected without wealth and leave office with it.
I know our elected officials, particularly at the federal level are paid well and with their perks and budgets are well funded. But I’m not talking about personal savings that these people might normally employ. I’m talking about wealth.
Where does the ofttimes millions of dollars these people accumulate while in office come from? They’re not getting paid enough for that to happen.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump famously campaigned on “draining the swamp” but Ronald Reagan was the first to refer to Washington with the term. The area inside the Washington beltway is called the ‘swamp’ for good reason. It’s called corruption.
With the federal government is involved in so many aspects of daily life, it’s difficult to not affect the value of various companies. Most major corporations spend tons of money lobbying looking for advantage and profit.
Members of Congress and presidential administrations have no legal requirement to limit self-interest when it comes to investing their money. So, they know when various pieces of legislation or policy will affect the stock prices of companies impacted by those actions. The SEC has rules regarding insider trading but oversight of the investments of elected officials’ investment activities is rare.
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or the STOCK Act, in 2012.explicitly prohibits members of Congress from using inside knowledge they come across in the performance of their duties for private gain. But subsequently four senators – Sens. Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Jim Inhofe and Dianne Feinstein – were investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for an investing scandal. No charges were brought and the investigation was closed. The SEC did not get involved.
Last year, venture capitalist and husband of then House Speaker Nancy, Paul Pelosi, sold up to $5 million worth of shares of a computer chipmaker and leading GPU manufacturer Nvidia Corp (NVDA:US), as the House prepared to vote on a bill focused on domestic chip manufacturing. Nothing was done.
And while leftover campaign funds when an official leaves office cannot be withdrawn for direct personal gain, it’s not unusual for those people to ‘hire’ spouse or family connected businesses and pay them from campaign funds. Is the “swamp” becoming evident?
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley on January 24, 2023 introduced a bill to ban lawmakers from stock trading during their tenure in elected office. The name which he gave to this proposed bill is quite intriguing, “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments” or short for the PELOSI Act. This bill would prohibit members of Congress and their spouses from holding or trading individual stocks and the members found in violation will have to return their earned profits to American Taxpayers according to the proposed bill.
“For too long, politicians in Washington have taken advantage of the economic system they write the rules for, turning profits for themselves at the expense of the American people.” Hawley remarked.
I would suggest all federal elected officials be required to put their assets into “blind” trusts upon taking office.
The Trust in Congress Act, introduced a year ago, would require a Member of Congress, as well as any spouse or dependent child of a Member, to place specified investments into a qualified blind trust (i.e., an arrangement in which certain financial holdings are placed in someone else’s control to avoid a possible conflict of interest) until 180 days after the end of their tenure as a Member of Congress. Only about 20 members currently voluntarily to this.
After thinking more about this temptation for corruption, it’s occurring to ask other questions like: How does China control so much of what happens in Washington? Is anyone concerned about Hunter Biden’s foreign escapades? Why do big pharma and big manufacturing spend so much lobbying? Facebook (Meta Platforms) spent over $20M, Microsoft $8.5B. Big pharma spent over $5B with Pfizer leading the way at over $10M. They must be getting their money’s worth, or they wouldn’t be doing it. Who’s getting rich off the Russia/Ukraine war? How much money is provided to Congressional members by the Military Industrial Complex mega-companies? Who’s getting richer? I know we aren’t!
Statistica’s current estimate of the total spent on lobbying in 2022 in Washington is 3.73B. Somebody’s pockets are being lined. What’s worse is so many votes are for sale. It’s blatant corruption.
Elected officials can take personal monetary advantage of what they do and don’t do with ‘inside’ information. There’s nothing to stop it and most take advantage of that fact.
With the latest poll showing Congress with a 22.7% approval rating, it behooves it do something about not getting elected to make him/herself rich while supposedly serving the country.
Want to get rich today? Run for office.
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Have a great and prosperous week.
Hug somebody.
References:
https://www.unz.com/mmalkin/torpedo-the-traitorous-america-competes-act/
How Do Members of Congress Get So Rich? – Truth News Network
https://www.quora.com/Do-Congressmen-have-to-put-their-assets-in-a-blind-trust
https://ballotpedia.org/What_can_politicians_do_with_unused_campaign_funds
https://www.capitoltrades.com/articles/a-new-dilemma-for-insider-trading-pelosi-act-2023-01-27
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/trackers/us-congress-approval-rating
https://www.statista.com/statistics/257337/total-lobbying-spending-in-the-us/
SPIDER Bites
Here’s this week’s trivia question: What four presidents are depicted on Mount Rushmore? Last week’s answer to the fairy in Peter Pan was Tinkerbelle.)
Meteorologist Punxsutawney Phil predicted 6 more weeks of winter after seeing his shadow on Thursday. Phil needs to practice Positive Psychotherapy Exercises.
The Fed raised interest rates another ¼% last week to an average of 4.75% – the 8th consecutive time it has done so, further increasing how much we’ll pay for mortgages, auto financing, credit cards and other loans. Chairman Powell called it “disinflation” – a new word for finance students. By raising the rates the Fed is trying to slow inflation – but doing so also triggers an economic slowdown – already underway – which on the monetary policy side requires interest rate reductions to fix. We’ve talked about the rock and a hard place our leaders have put the Federal Reserve Bank in with their runaway spending. Look for 2023-24 to be very rocky in the stock markets.
Speaker McCarthy met with President Biden last week to discuss raising the debt ceiling from the current $31.4T – already 30% more than everyone and everything in this country is worth.
3 FBI agents spent 3 hours searching the beach home of President Biden last week for classified documents after he and his spouse spent the weekend there. 30 agents spent all day last August searching Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. The fix has been in.
Included in new standards issued by the Energy Dept. is that pilot lights on gas stoves would be banned. I’d say if nobody is supposed to have a gas stove to begin with, banning their pilot lights is immaterial. We pay people to come up with this stuff?
By the way, President Biden decreed the COVID emergency will end on May 11. Maybe then somebody will find the $100B+ stolen from all the COVID relief packages. Oh, the House passed a bill last week requiring the 47% of all government workers who haven’t been to work the last three years because of the COVID ‘emergency’ actually return to work. 205 Democrats voted against it. I don’t know if the 87,000 new IRS agents will need to report to work to get their guns.
One of the provisions of the $1T infrastructure bill passed in 2021 is for the Transportation Dept. start a pilot program aimed at levying a tax on drivers for each mile driven. Such a system would require a tracking device on every vehicle on the road. Ready for that?
In addition to state-of-the-art tanks, President Biden is now sending longer range missile bombs to Ukraine. Escalation, but no negotiations. It’s just another $2.2B – 2,200 millions.
At the same time, we allowed a Chinese surveillance balloon to fly over the entire continental United States for a week before shooting it down yesterday as it entered the Atlantic. It’s incredulous we waited until it passed – and after it collected and sent whatever desired information.
According to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the month of December 2022, Florida had 9.669 million employed workers, compared to New York’s 9.661 million. That marked the first time since the BLS began keeping this data in 1982 that Florida’s workforce was larger than New York’s. It’s not surprising.
You might be wondering what happened to the “save the whales” environmentalists. In the last two months, 9 whales – 2 sperm and 7 humpback – have been found beached and dead on the shores of N. Jersey and N. York. What’s different now? Offshore windmills. Haven’t heard a peep from savethewhales.org.
Here’s a comment by Albert Einstein: “The is a major difference between intelligence and stupidity; intelligence has its limits.”
