Get into Congress.

The minimum salary for a member of congress is $174,000 a year.  

Now, that might seem like a lot of money.  Maybe, even a life-changing amount After all, the average American makes about three times less. 

But, in reality, that numbepr means very little to many of our politicians. That six-figure check is pretty insignificant when you compare it to the wealth of someone like nancy Pelosi, whose net worth is somewhere upward of $115 million. 

For reference, that ridiculous amount of money puts her in the top 0.1% of Americans and makes her one of the wealthiest politicians in this country. 

If she had made all that through her salary alone, never spending a penny, and only ever cashing in her current all-time high house speaker salary of $239,000 she would have had to work for over 500 years. 

Now, Pelosi is not a vampire despite what some very convincing Facebook posts say.  So, where did all this money come from?  Where do any of our politicians make their money? 

As it turns out, Nancy's situation isn't all that unique. Many congress people see their wealth grow by thousands of percentage points after they're elected and the majority of our federal lawmakers are full-on millionaires. 

For reference, and I can't believe I feel the need to say this, most Americans not millionaires! So, where does all this money come from? 

Let's stick with Pelosi for a bit. There are a few ways she and other politicians make their money but the first one we obviously have to talk about is investment using Nancy's public records. 

Researchers at Open Secrets found that in 2018 she invested $46.5 million in real estate, another $15.8 million in electronics manufacturing, and a cool $15 million into just Apple, admittedly this doesn't tell us where the spending money first comes from, we'll get to that later but this information still matters a lot that's because, as it turns out, Nancy Pelosi is an investment genius. 

Investing and doing a bang-up job at it has been one of the big ways she and her husband paul have been able to multiply their fortunes during her tenure as a politician between 2020 and 2021. 

The Pelosi's traded over $50 million  in assets for an annualized return of 69%, nice! 

Now, that number doesn't mean anything to me except the obvious thing. So, I googled it and this is about six to seven times higher than the average stock market return, making her a better investor than Warren  Buffett, George Soros, and Kathy Wood, whose whole deal is investing! 

They don't spend any time holding elected office or anything.  The point is that these returns are incredibly lucrative, while millions of Americans fell into poverty because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Pelosi's wealth grew by an eye-watering $16.7 million! 

So, of course, when a reporter asks her the question, “Should members of Congress and their spouses be banned from tradingindividual stocks while serving in congress?”

She said, “No!” 

Okay, Pelosi is an incredibly “talented”  investor and it might be tempting to single her out, but none of this is all that unusual. It turns out, Congress  people have always been surprisingly good at investing! 

You might remember these four from the start of the pandemic in February. This  one wrote this article where he says, “The  U.S. is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats,” but then a week later he did this. 

Weird. 

Well, not really before the rest of us knew how bad COVID-19 would get, but after internal briefings by the CDC and Fauci on the severity of the upcoming Pandemic. 

These four senators dumped a whole bunch of money they held in the stock market right as it was about to crash. They all made hundreds of thousands of dollars presumably using information not disclosed to the public. 

But, hey now, maybe they're just really good investors? 

The DOJ certainly seems to think so, since all the investigations into what they did have since been closed. 

Seems reasonable. 

Here again, I want to be clear that what these senators did is not special. I had led with the people with names and faces, but this trend is bigger than four senators and the Pelosi's. 

Congress people have always been surprisingly good at investing! 

A five-month-long business insider investigation found that at least 49 members of congress and 182 high-ranking congressional staffers engage in insider trading. 

Multiple successive academic reports that looked into senatorial stock returns have consistently found that, overall, senators are just really good at beating the market!

Why? Well, if you look at a 2017 report by Public Citizen about senators and stock trading, you'll find that many individual senators often trade stocks in businesses that they oversee in their official capacity. 

I'm no expert but this might be a problem, no? 

What do I know? I should just listen to people like Pelosi who always know what to say and have the best explanations for why this isn't a problem. 

Truly airtight arguments because this is a free market. 

Makes sense to me. Everybody say thank you to Mrs. Pelosi for that valuable lesson in economics but fine what if investments and abuses of information couldn't explain any of the astonishing wealth of our politicians? 

Another good place to look is lobbying. Lobbying is a very very well-funded industry. In 2021, $3.7 billion were spent on federal lobbying alone. 

As you can see from this list the top spenders are almost exclusively businesses large industries and the firms that represent them. 

You can put that info on a graph and it looks like this, Labor and Citizen special interests represent almost nothing. If lobbying were a bag of Chex mix, you'd be getting like one rye chip per 50 handfuls of

pretzels. 

But, the thing with lobbying is that it doesn't work like an outright bribe. There's a lot of money in lobbying but in the grand scheme of things, the amounts that are actually spent mean very little to the politicians. 

While I can tell you that Nancy Pelosi got $180k from officially registered lobbyists,  she's not really getting that money for herself. That money mainly goes into campaign financing and then there's all sorts of amounts not on this list that go into things like, extravagant dinners. 

In any case, it's not where the millions of dollars in the Pelosi bank account are coming from, lobbying gets money into political hands in a much more indirect way that's sustained by a mutually beneficial relationship to get the wheels turning on this relationship. 

Lobbies will get close to politicians using a business's wealth to build rapport that can be translated into favorable legislation or outright subsidies essentially. 

They'll pay for ways to sit at the same table at a nice restaurant or get an hour in the right office. 

Why? 

Well, one study estimates that every dollar spent on lobbying returns an average of $760. 

If that number seems a little high to you, and it might very well be, regardless of what the actual amount is, it will always be more than what's put in. 

Businesses wouldn't lobby if it didn't serve them. 

But, that's just what businesses get from lobbying, what about politicians? 

Well, for politicians, the benefits of lobbying are split between long-term and short-term benefits. 

In the long term, politicians know that two-thirds of them will leave politics to enter the lobbying industry once their years in government will have made them very valuable assets to lobbyists and therefore come with a nice big bag of money with a dollar sign on it. 

That means that politicians spend years in office greasing the revolving door that'll let them leave government with lucrative jobs in the industries they cozied up to during their tenure. 

But, that's for the long term. In the short term, cozying up to lobbyists can come with other more immediate benefits. 

For example, in 2008, after VISA made a few small contributions to Pelosi's campaign, her husband paul was granted privileged access to a VISA IPO, where he was able to invest a large sum of money before stock prices went up and all Nancy had to do was stall the passage of a law that would cut into VISA'S PROFITS. 

Which she did. 

But fine, let's keep going and assume investment and lobbying mean absolutely nothing to these people's wallets. 

The reality is a lot of our politicians are just exceptionally wealthy right off the bat. While a lot of politicians use their office as an elevator into the upper strata, many others come in fully formed using government only to exaggerate their already impressive wealth. 

That's the case for the Pelosi's whose shared

finances are built on the venture capital firm that Paul founded. The company with probably the least googlable name in the world: 

FINANCIAL LEASING SERVICES

I know I focused on the Pelosi's a lot in this video but this applies to like half our politicians and there's a reason for that. 

Being wealthy opens up a corridor to political life that being an average American just doesn't. 

At the personal level, being wealthy means you don't have to worry about keeping a full-time job while you run or making sure you have food on the table and a roof over your head. 

That's huge but that's not where the biggest benefits come from. The main reason the wealthy have such an easy time taking over politics comes from the fact that their incentives align with those of established parties. 

Political parties have an incentive to promote wealthier candidates and support them more because wealth begets wealth. 

Wealthy candidates come with wealthy connections that can be used to fundraise and finance ever more expensive campaigns. 

Wealthy candidates have a lot of friends who would all benefit from them winning and who will, therefore, be willing to raise money that parties can use to beat their opponents. 

Wealthy candidates also do not pose a threat to this model in a way that less wealthy more normal representatives do. 

If the only way you can get people into office is with generous checks from the wealthy, and that truly is the only reliable way to do it, then a candidate who opposes wealth of this kind threatens your party's whole electoral strategy. 

The wealthy do not want to finance a party that will take their dominant position in society away from them. 

People who do not look like you and me, who do not live the same lives, who do not face the same living conditions, make it into politics way more often just because it's easier for them than it is for a genuine representative of a country's citizens. 

Hence, this is why most Congress people are millionaires and most Americans aren't. 

And the thing is, there are real consequences. Our politics aredramatically influenced by all these different relationships to the capitalist class whether it's because of its disproportionate amount of seats at the table, its powerful use of lobbying, or the fact that it's in the best interest of politicians invested in the stock market to cater to capital. 

These people are not like you, they do not represent you, and they don't act in your interest. 

This doesn't mean that not a single law gets passed that protects those who work for a living, those laws just aren't the priority they get artificially delayed, pared down to the bare minimum, and written carefully to only sacrifice the short-term interest of capital for the long-term survival of the capitalist economy. 

What matters is not the individual battles, it's that the overall outcome doesn't threaten profitability, the balance of power is on their side.

Wrestling it away and putting that power back in the hands of the people is the. first priority.