Exclusive: How Politicians' Wealth Changes Over Time
Part One: At Least 17% of Congress Beat the Market Since 2011
“Everyone in Congress is insider trading!”
”Pelosi & McConnell are profiting off of their political positions!”
For generations, everyone’s “drunk uncle” has been parroting these types of claims. And maybe you’ve never been able to challenge him because how can you prove him wrong?! Plus, politicians on both sides of the aisle have perpetuated this idea, whether to champion stock trading bans as a bipartisan issue or pillory their opponents for perceived corruption.
Well, we have good news for you ahead of that next family gathering. Courtesy of Hunter Index’s exclusive database, we can offer you a look at the data that might back up some nuanced challenges to your drunk uncle’s uninformed tropes about insider trading.
So, what is in this new series? Since Hunter Index is the most complete and robust database of U.S. politicians’ personal finances, we can offer you an exclusive look at how the personal wealth of politicians has changed over the last decade or so. We’ve analyzed the financial disclosure forms of the 172 members of Congress who were in office in 2011 and 2023 — the most current year for which this data is available. (That includes a handful of members who moved from the House to the Senate during this time period.)
While the average politician is certainly far wealthier than the average American — meaning many of them did gain hundreds of thousands, or even millions, over that time span — the data also suggests that politicians aren’t that different from us when it comes to how their wealth has fared over time. That is to say, people’s wallets expand or shrink based on life situations like marriages, divorces, inheritances, and market changes affecting the value of assets ranging from real estate to stocks.
A few members grew their portfolios significantly, with nine seeing at least a tenfold increase in value. But most gained modestly, while others lost money, seeing their portfolios shrink by up to around 90% of their 2011 values.
Note: the biggest outlier was Rep. Doris Matsui, whose sizable gains came as a result of her marriage to AES Corporation co-founder Roger Sant in 2020.
Uber-wealthy members like Pelosi and McConnell are outliers here when it comes to their overall portfolio values ($66 million and $15 million, respectively), but not when it comes to how their portfolios have grown: On that metric, they come in below average.
Zooming in to exclude outliers both in wealth and growth, we get a more varied picture of how members as a whole fared:
What’s Next?
In coming editions of this series, we will dive into specific members who beat the market or lost their shirts.
Quick Hits
The winners and losers: Around 73% of members saw their portfolios gain value, while around 27% saw their portfolios shrink.
But while most members saw gains, just 17% of them beat “the market,” meaning the value of their financial portfolios performed better than the S&P 500 Index. In this case, that meant growth of over 279% — the amount the S&P 500 Index grew from the close of 2011 to the close of 2023.
When it comes to liabilities — which we’ll analyze separately from assets — 70% paid off or reduced their debts.
A reminder: The base salary of members of Congress is $174k per year. So, in this analysis over a 13-year time period, each politician would have earned at least $2.2 million in congressional pay — more than the average American makes in their lifetime according to the Social Security Administration.
So while this data doesn’t suggest that serving in Congress has allowed members to inflate their wealth through nefarious means like insider trading, that’s not to say their sizable assets don’t influence their actions as lawmakers.
A Note on Methodology
Why did we only go back to 2011 data? That’s when our editor Jay Hunter first started covering this data for Roll Call. We encourage you to check out their daily coverage of all things “Washington.”
Also, personal financial disclosure reports are only stored for a limited amount of time by Congress, so it’s essentially impossible to track changes for members who have held office for decades.
Lastly, the values used in this analysis are minimum estimates of the value of each member’s assets. That’s because these reports disclose the values of each asset held by a member in broad ranges, and we estimated the value of each asset at the minimum value of its reported value range. For example, our estimate considers an asset reported as being worth $15,001 - $50,000 to be worth $15,001. Assets reported in the maximum reported value range (over $50 million) are valued at $50,000,001.
Also, we will be using percent change figures, which is pretty standard when tracking portfolio changes over time.
Why Does It Matter?
Please be informed of your politicians’ personal finances.
That’s our mission at the Hunter Index. We believe it is important for constituents to understand how their government officials’ personal finances may affect their policy making decisions as well as understanding the potential wide disparity between their wealth and that of the people in their home state or district.
Remember our favorite questions: Would you make a decision that costs your family money for the public good? Isn’t that what we ask of our government officials?
Managing Hunter Index and its exclusive database which makes reporting like this article possible is extremely expensive and labor intensive.
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