politics

Shutting down legitimate criticism of leadership is MAGA type thinking. Knock THAT off. Pretending the politicians you support are flawless or deflecting valid grievances with whataboutisms is not how you hold your party accountable for its shortcomings.

So ~~last year~~ earlier this year when this issue was getting a lot of attention, this chart produced by unusualwhales.com was spread around:

Looks kind of bad, right? SPY is being used for comparison, and it's near the bottom of that chart. Look at all those congress critters playing the market and winning! They must be corrupt.

Except that this is a small fraction of the total membership of the US Congress. Out of 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, the 32 members shown here represent 6% of congress, and they have been specifically selected as the top performers. There's nothing exactly wrong with showing them in a chart this way, but it's very important to understand that this means 94% of congress members did not beat SPY. If you have the idea that congress members in general are substantially profiteering from stock trading, that is directly contradicted by the evidence.

OK, so what about these top performers? Are they individually corrupt? How could we know?

If certain members of congress were regularly using their legislative access to earn profit on the stock market, well that should show up in long-term statistics. If they do this a lot, they should be beating SPY consistently, right?

So we can look at the larger chart from the 2023 report:

And then we can compare it with the one from 2022:

And so do we see any correlations? Well, no not really. The names at the top of 2023 are completely different from 2022. Nancy Pelosi actually lost about 20% of her portfololio value in 2022. There are a couple names that appear on both lists but their performance varies wildly from one year to the next.

Obviously 2 years isn't enough data to identify real trends, but at least in this context we can see that you can't really justify the idea that stock trading corruption is common in congress. Only a small fraction of congress members do better than SPY in either 2022 or 2023, and they aren't the same people year to year.

The vast majority of congress members have lower returns than SPY, and that is the only actual trend supported by the data.

I'm cool with throwing them all in prison for it.

Two are non issues, and one is an issue that a great deal of congress members are guilty of.

Nope! She's not alone in the practice but as the speaker she greatly normalized the corruption and made incredible money at the cost of her constituents.

She did a fair amount of good but her deserved legacy is someone who ripped off those she represented for her personal gain.

Wait, so how many congress people have an ice cream freezer, then?

She's an influencal member of Congress that was in the leadership postion and holds herself out as a defender of the working class as she blatantly enriched herself. She's fucking married to a investment banker. Responding to calling out a power elite for behavior they 100% engaged in as misogyny is a bit much.

She IS a meme of old money greed. That's all it is.