Just folks

For those who wonder why members of Congress so often seem untroubled by the gap between the one percent and the rest of the country, Maine’s Portland Press-Herald has scrutinized the financial disclosures of the last Congress and the current Congress. One of the newspaper’s findings is that congressmembers keep getting richer—and are leaping ahead of the rest of the country rapidly.

Congresses meet in two-year sessions, and they file their disclosures at the start of each session. The Press-Herald checked the 2018-2019 disclosures against the 2015-2017 disclosures and reported:

“The total wealth of all current members was at least $2.43 billion when the 115th Congress began, 20 percent more than the collective riches of the previous Congress, a significant gain during a period when both the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose slightly less than 10 percent.”

Reporter David Hawkings, who did the research, also reported that one in 13 members of Congress is a one-percenter.