"Congressional salaries are $174,000. That pay has not increased since 2009; in real dollars, salaries are the lowest they’ve been since 1955. Our health insurance is purchased on the Affordable Care Act exchange. We pay 30% of the premium; the House of Representatives pays 70%, similar to most workplace insurance plans. ... Mandatory pensions take up 4.4% of the salary.... two residences are required; votes keep House members in Washington, D.C., about a hundred days each year. No housing allowance or per diem is paid, and no tax deduction for business housing is permitted. ...
Juxtapose these facts against the misconception that people become rich by serving in Congress. ... Congress is full of multimillionaires for the same reason that the NBA is full of tall people. It’s easier to get recruited and win with such advantages. Serving in Congress does not pad your bank account any more than playing basketball adds inches to your height. While we might accept physical attributes in athletes as natural or desirable, wealth does not give a better perspective for politics. It undercuts the purpose of representative democracy.
Americans rightfully fume that congressmembers trade stocks, convinced that insider information is misused, but we refuse to squarely address the harm that comes from representatives having such wealth in the first place. From 2019 to 2022, over 130 members of the House of Representatives each traded over $100,000 of stock. To trade that dollar volume in a year, these folks are either addicted day traders who cannot manage their money (much less our economy), or—and this is the reality—they own stocks worth many multiples of what they traded.
Representatives who are my peers in age and years of political service—like Cindy Axne, Mike Garcia, Ashley Hinson, Ro Khanna, Tom Malinowski, Blake Moore, Kim Schrier, and Mikie Sherrill—have each traded over $1 million while in office. In my life before Congress, I knew that people with net worths in the tens of millions were not my peers. Pretending they are in Congress is an indignity."
From I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan by US Rep Katie Porter
