Congress, meanwhile, is a club that consists of millionaires. Based on data, there are currently 66 in the Senate and in the House among current voting members. So while just 1 percent of Americans are millionaires, 66 percent of senators are millionaires, as are 41 percent of House members. The median net worth of freshman House members is more than half a million dollars, according the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based, non-partisan research group that tracks the effect of money on elections and public policy.
Multiple factors contribute to this picture. It begins with campaigns that have become increasingly costly to run, making it all the more difficult for a person of modest income to run for office. National parties, looking for ways to bring down their own costs, actively recruit wealthy candidates. Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector.
And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further. The average estimated personal wealth of congressional members far exceeds the average American's wealth, according to Dave Levinthal, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Center regularly goes through the time-consuming process of reviewing congressional financial disclosure reports -- which are only filed on paper -- and publishing the information in a reader-friendly online format. Their work has shown that, besides a slight dip between and , Congress' personal wealth has continued to rise. At the same time that Congress has become more of a millionaires' club, running a congressional campaign has become increasingly costly.
There's no empirical evidence to suggest the two are related, but any political operative will tell you that not everyone can afford to run a campaign.
As a congressional candidate, "every waking minute of every day is devoted to that campaign," said Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee. When you've got a mortgage to pay and college tuition and braces to pay for, those kinds of day-to-day, real-life expenses come before putting six months into a campaign.
The amount of money a candidate needs gets larger with each election cycle. Factors like incumbency play a huge role in the outcome of elections, but so does money: Since the election, candidates who spent more money in open seat House races won 86 percent of the time, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. If a candidate doesn't put up the money himself, it's up to the political party backing him to do so.
How much are your senators and representatives worth? After heated budget debates, threats of government shutdowns and multiple votes to raise the debt ceiling, Congress has been dealing with fiscal issues on a regular basis. It is no wonder, then, that when the average citizen has the means to take a peek at each members ability to handle his or her personal finance, intrigue abounds. The latest data calculated by OpenSecrets.
This is the first time in history that the majority of members are millionaires. For information on which members saw the highest change during their tenure, please see Ballotpedia's page on the Changes in Net Worth of U.
Senators and Representatives Personal Gain Index. The data outlined on this page comes from OpenSecrets. They obtained the data from personal financial disclosure data that each senator and representative is required to provide for public record.
Below are average net worth numbers for first year freshman members for each recent session of Congress. Every year members of congress are required by law to disclose certain financial information regarding personal assets and liabilities. That data, currently available for the years to , is listed in part below in the section Individual data.
Congressional financial disclosure forms use value ranges, rather than precise amounts, when reporting assets and liabilities. OpenSecrets gathers this information to build a range of potential values. OpenSecrets combines all assets and liability to form a total potential range of values, and then provides an average value as the best guess of each individual's net worth.
Ballotpedia staff took OpenSecrets predicted net worth averages for all reported members of congress and using statistical software calculated yearly averages and changes for various congressional subsets. OpenSecrets notes some important limitations to the data: [5]. Disclaimer: All data relating to the average net worth of individual members of congress from OpenSecrets. All other content, including data analysis of net worth change, is posted under Ballotpedia's standard content license.
Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers.
Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Candidates from working-class jobs made up just 4 percent of both Republican and Democratic candidates in nationwide surveys of people campaigning for state legislatures in and , according to Nicholas Carnes in The Guardian.
His cabinet is mostly millionaires. Most members of Congress are millionaires. Most supreme court justices are millionaires. Millionaires make up less than 3 percent of the general public but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2 percent of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.
Here are 10 of the wealthiest Democrat millionaires in the U. House and Senate, and not one of them is African American. Mark Warner of Virginia is considered one of the richest Democratic senators. He has also been a venture capitalist. Warner had an early stake in the wireless service company Nextel, which was eventually bought by Sprint.
Currently, much of his fortune is held in blind trusts, USA Today reported. Blumenthal entered Congress in and his current term will end in Like several other lawmakers on this list, Blumenthal married into his vast fortune.
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