Politicians receive very comfortable salaries. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for instance, earns $223,500 a year, making her the third-highest-paid elected official in the U.S. Yet, since 2004, her wealth has increased from $41 million to nearly $115 million, according to OpenSecrets, which began tracking lawmakers’ personal finances that year.
She’s not alone in her wealth. Personal financial disclosures reveal that more than half of Congress members are millionaires, with a median net worth of just over $1 million. As is often the case, however, the top 10% of the lawmakers in terms of wealth are three times richer than the bottom 90%. Pelosi comes in as number 6 on a list of the wealthiest members of the 116th Congress.
At issue isn’t the fact that politicians are multimillionaires — rather, as noted on a recent Twitter thread by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, it’s how they made their millions:
“If you think it’s fine and normal that the Speaker of the House’s personal wealth tripled to $115 million ever since financial disclosures were required (2004), that’s fine, but the issue is how that money was made. It was from companies directly affected by her actions.”
Politicians get rich from ‘lucky’ stock trading
In the last two years, nearly 75% of Pelosi’s stock trades have involved Big Tech stocks, totaling over $33 million in trading. “That has happened as major legislation is pending before the House, controlled by the committees Pelosi oversees, which could radically reshape the industry and laws that govern the very companies in which she and her husband most aggressively trade,” Greenwald wrote in a blog.
Pelosi’s most traded company was Apple, accounting for 17.7% of her trades. But unlike most people buying and selling Apple stock, Pelosi had the privilege of speaking privately with Apple CEO Tim Cook on at least one occasion to discuss the company’s standing and how it could be affected by pending bills relating to Silicon Valley reforms.
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