Does The Road To Riches Run Through Washington, D.C.?

I recently came across an interesting website that tracks the net worth of members of Congress.

The website, Quiver Quantitative, also has a Congress Trading Dashboard that tracks all stock trades made by our elected representatives in Congress.

Source: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/

 

On the Net Worth page of the website the daily increase/decrease in each representatives investment portfolio is also  calculated.

For example, here is a screen grab from a recent day sorted by the gain/ loss for each member of Congress.

Note that in that one day Nancy Pelosi saw investment gains of more than $1 million.

For context, her Congressional salary is $174,000 per year.

Credit: https://twitter.com/RedsRepair95/status/1782806065681203236

Pelosi is also the second wealthiest member of Congress with a current net worth approaching $250 million.

There are a number of members of Congress who came to Washington with substantial fortunes from their lives in the private sector. Senator Rick Scott (#1 in net worth) and Mitt Romney (#3) are examples.

However, it is rather incredible how wealthy Pelosi has become at age 83 considering that she has been in Congress since 1987 (37 years). To the best of my knowledge she also has never had a private sector job. Pelosi was Chair of the Northern California Democrat party and then Chair for the state political party in the seven years previous to coming to Congress.

Pelosi and her husband had a reported net worth of $3.5 million when she first came to Congress.

It is also stunning the amount of wealth that Pelosi has accumulated in the last ten years.

In 2014 Roll Call (as cited in Wikipedia) estimated Pelosi's net worth at $29 million.

This means that Pelosi has increased her net worth by over 8-fold in the last 10 years.

It might be easy to give credit to Pelosi's husband, Paul, for this gigantic increase in wealth if he was running a massively successful business. Paul Pelosi does own a venture capital firm but he is now 84 years old. Most of the wealth of the Pelosi's in the last decade seems to have come from extremely well-timed purchases of stocks in the tech sector.

Wouldn't it have been great if Nancy Pelosi had been as adept at balancing the federal budget as she was increasing her net worth over the last 37 years?

Perhaps the country would have been better served if Pelosi and her husband had been put in charge of investing the Social Security Trust Funds over the last decade instead of letting them be totally invested in U.S. Treasury securities?

Another name that caught my eye on the Quiver Quantitative website was that of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell, age 81, has been in the U.S. Senate for the last 39 years (since 1985).

He is listed as the 23rd richest member of Congress with a net worth of $46 million. That is more than double what his net worth was reported to be in 2014.

Before McConnell was elected to the Senate in 1984, he worked in the U.S. Justice Department in the Ford administration beginning in 1974 and was the County Executive in Jefferson County, Kentucky  (Louisville) for seven years.

This means that McConnell has worked and collected a government paycheck for the last 50 years but has still been able to accumulate a personal fortune of almost $50 million.

It is quite remarkable.

Does the road to riches run through Washington, D.C.?

It apparently does.

Unless you are Donald J. Trump.

Remember how much we heard that Donald Trump was using The White House to enrich himself?

How did that work out exactly?

When Trump first announced he was running for President in 2015 Forbes magazine estimated his net worth to be $4.5 billion. 

Just before the 2020 election Forbes estimated that Trump's net worth had dropped to $2.5 billion.

There has been no President in my lifetime who saw their wealth suffer after serving in office---except Donald Trump.

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton got enormously wealthy after serving as President. Joe Biden cashed in big time after being Vice President.

As of the fall of 2023 Forbes estimated Trump's net worth at $2,6 billion but he was no longer on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. In 2015 he was #121. 

In ten years since first getting involved in politics Trump has seen his net worth almost cut in half.

Over those same ten years Nancy Pelosi has increased her net worth 8 times and Mitch McConnell has doubled his.

The final scorecard on wealth over the last 10 years or so.

Pelosi              up  700%

McConnell     up  100%

Trump            down 50%

Who has enriched themselves in public office and who has not?

You may or may not like Donald Trump, but the fact is that it is likely that no man who has been President has ever sacrificed so much, for so so little personal benefit, than Donald Trump.

If you don't believe that, go ask him while he sits in that New York City courtroom today.

Then go to the Quiver Quantitative website and see how a couple of Washington insiders who have inhabited the swamp for decades are doing.