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| Brookings Corporate Sponsors |
I refer to this in USA Today (link) back in November:
Lawmakers disclose their assets and liabilities only in broad ranges. So the numbers are estimates — the average of a member's lowest and highest possible net worth. Their actual wealth is often higher because disclosures don't include home values.
Despite some superwealthy members, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution says Congress generally reflects the middle class.
"In many cases, the top 10% are self-made … and it reflects something that's in the American psyche," he says. "We're not against people being rich. We just wish we were. But we are particularly attracted to people who made their own riches."
In the USA Today list of 530 US Representatives and Senators, fully 250 or 47 percent declare their net worth, sans their homes, to be $1 million or more. Add in everybody down to a declared net worth of $600K or more (the average of $1.1 million and $100K) and the list balloons to 315 or almost 60 percent of the Congress.
By contrast, 75 percent of the American people have average net worth of less than $80,000 as of 2007. In view of what has happened to housing values since then, I would expect more people to be worth even less than that.
Unlike the members of Congress in the USA Today report, household net worth calculations as tracked by the Federal Reserve include home values.
And between 2006 and Q3 2011, household net worth has fallen by $7.8 trillion, $6.6 trillion of which has been lost in the real estate maelstrom.
For Brookings to say Congressional wealth generally reflects the middle class is preposterous. Kind of like The Wall Street Journal claiming the tax money the government needs so desperately will be found in the middle class, not among the wealthy. Lies, damned lies, designed to rough you up before they pick your pockets again.
WE ARE RULED BY THE RICH.
Anyone who contributes one red cent to their campaigns should be . . . er, institutionalized.
