Report: 237 millionaires in Congress
Talk about bad timing.As Washington reels from the news of 10.2 percent unemployment, the Center for Responsive Politics is out with a new report describing the wealth of members of Congress.
Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That’s 44 percent of the body – compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall.
CRP says California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is the richest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, with a net worth estimated at about $251 million. Next in line: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), worth about $244.7 million; Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), worth about $214.5 million; Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), worth about $209.7 million; and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), worth about $208.8 million.
All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center’s 2008 figures.
“Many Americans probably have a sense that members of Congress aren’t hurting, even if their government salary alone is in the six figures, much more than most Americans make,” said CRP spokesman Dave Levinthal. “What we see through these figures is that many of them have riches well beyond that salary, supplemented with securities, stock holdings, property and other investments.”
The CRP numbers are somewhat rough estimates – lawmakers are required to report their financial information in broad ranges of figures, so it’s impossible to pin down their dollars with precision. The CRP uses the mid-point in the ranges to build its estimates.
Senators’ estimated median reportable worth sunk to about $1.79 million from $2.27 million in 2007. The House’s median income was significantly lower and also sank, bottoming out at $622,254 from $724,258 in 2007.
But CRP’s analysis suggests that some lawmakers did well for themselves between 2007 and 2008, even as many Americans lost jobs and saw their savings and their home values plummet.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gained about $9.2 million. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gained about $3 million, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) had an estimated $2.6 million gain, and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) gained about $2.8 million.
Some lawmakers have profited from investments in companies that have received federal bailouts; dozens of lawmakers are invested in Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Among executive branch officials, CRP says the richest is Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro, with a net worth estimated at $26 million.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is next, worth an estimated $21 million. President Barack Obama is the sixth-wealthiest, worth about an estimated $4 million. Vice President Joe Biden has often tagged himself as an original blue collar man. The CRP backs him up, putting his net worth at just $27,000.
He’s hardly the worst off.
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), freshman Rep. Harry Teague (D-N.M.), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) each a net worth of less than zero, CRP says.
One caveat on those numbers: Federal financial disclosure laws don’t require members to list the value of their personal residences. That information could alter the net worth picture for many lawmakers.
Even so, Levinthal said, “It is clear that some members are struggling financially.
“Over a calendar year, one’s wealth can change drastically. Many peoples’ investments took a nose dive over night in the last year,” he said.
A number of lawmakers are estimated to have suffered double-digit percentage lossed in their net worth from 2007 to 2008. The biggest losers include Kerry, who lost a whopping $127.4 million; Warner lost about $28.1 million; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost about $11.8 million; and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost about $10.1 million.
Most Regressive Tax States
November 18th, 2009 · 3 Comments
The Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy has published a study titled Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States.Matthew Gardner, the lead author of the study, says that most states’ tax systems are highly regressive:
In the coming months, lawmakers across the nation will be forced to make difficult decisions about budget-balancing tax change which makes it vital to understand who is hit hardest by state and local taxes right now.
The harsh reality is that most states require their poor and middle income taxpayers to pay the most taxes as a share of income.
Nationwide, Gardner’s study found that middle- and low-income non-elderly families pay much higher percentages of their income in state and local taxes than do the well off.Here are the 10 most regressive states:
- Washington
- Florida
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Illinois
- Arizona
- Nevada
- Pennsylvania
- Alabama
2012 Presidential material
The SARAH - I can see over to Russia, making me an expert in foreign relations … can’t even seem to let slights from cartoon TV show slide by…
You betcha … folksy whimsical sayings to deflect serious thought process … We need to support our North Korean allies ?????? I need a new dress
The DONALD … now he knows about the struggles of Middle Class Americans …
The NEWT
AP – FILE - In this March 7, 2011 file photo, former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich speaks in Waukee, Iowa. Potential … – 57 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich quietly lined up
$150,000 to help defeat Iowa justices who threw out a ban on same-sex marriage,
routing the money to conservative groups through an aide's political committee.
Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker who has aggressively courted the
conservatives who dominate Iowa's lead-off presidential caucuses, raised the
money for the political arm of Restoring American Leadership, also known as
ReAL.
That group then passed $125,000 to American Family Association Action and an
additional $25,000 to the Iowa Christian Alliance — two of the groups that spent
millions before last November's elections that removed three of the state's
seven state Supreme Court justices. The court had unanimously decided a state
law restricting marriage to a man and a woman violated Iowa's constitution.
The financial transfers, which appear to comply with campaign finance laws, were
part of a steady flow of cash into Iowa from conservative groups such as the
National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council.
The spending comes as Gingrich is seeking to make allies among social
conservatives who drive the caucuses, though some voters might question whether
an outsider should be raising money for a contentious ideological fight confined
to one state.
(Side note - to run for President the Newt needs to divest himself of five or more very lucrative political enterprises.)
The Michele -
Stop Taking Bachmann Seriously!
Eric Alterman – Thu Mar 24, 11:38 pm ET
NEW YORK – Michele Bachmann is “reportedly” ready to form a presidential exploratory committee in early June. Shame on me (and this website) for paying the slightest bit of attention to this foolish and ridiculous spectacle, but here we are.
It’s a challenge to decide what, exactly, is silliest about this story. First is the generic issue, independent of Bachmann. “Ready to form a presidential exploratory committee?” What the hell does that amount to? Imagine, sitting down at a restaurant, calling the waiter over, and explaining that you may be ready, at some future point, to form an “exploratory committee” to discuss what you might like to order for dinner. My guess is you might get a bottle of Perrier poured on your head.
OK, now let’s assume for the sake of argument, some actual content to this announcement. Let’s say Bachmann actually does, one day, form a presidential exploratory committee and even runs for the Republican nomination for president. After all, she has recently made multiple visits to key states like Iowa and New Hampshire and has been telling people that she will be filling out the necessary forms to be included in the party debates, which begin May 2 at the Reagan Library in California.
Bachmann has about as much chance of actually getting the nomination as Lindsay Lohan. Does anyone in the world, even Bachmann herself, sincerely believe that this would be anything other than an exercise in vanity and self-delusion?
But what is really craziest about the story of Bachmann’s candidacy—and most disturbing about the fact that it will be treated as an actual “hard news” story by so much of the media in the coming months—is the lady herself.
George Will calls Bachmann “an authentic representative of the Republican base.” Well, perhaps, but I don’t think it fair to smear millions of people with the sins of an individual so obviously mentally and emotionally challenged. Bachmann, whom the Tea Party appointed to give its response to President Obama’s State of the Union address (which CNN thought worthy of broadcasting live, in full) knows less American history than the students of Ms. Ajami’s seventh grade MS 54 Humanities class. (As the parent of one of them, I’ve seen their exams.) Like most seventh graders, but unlike Michele Bachmann, those kids know that that the famous “shot heard around the world in Lexington and Concord," was fired in Massachusetts, not New Hampshire.
Also unlike Bachmann, your average public-school seventh grader is aware that “the very founders that wrote” the U.S. Constitution did not “work tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”
That took a civil war, which took place long after all of them were long dead. Slavery seems to be a real blind spot for Bachmann. She imagines that all the people who came to America were "risk takers …. Other than Native Americans who were here, all of us have the same story. ... And they knew when they came here they weren't coming for a welfare state. ... They were coming here for the thrill of writing their own ticket. ... Who did we attract? People that wanted a better life and were willing to do what it took to get it."
Bachmann, whom the Tea Party appointed to give its response to President Obama’s State of the Union address knows less American history than the students of Ms. Ajami’s seventh grade MS 54 Humanities class.
Weird that Bachmann appears to think that people who were captured at gunpoint and then chained together with no privacy, dignity, and minimal food, caged for months in inhuman conditions and then sold as property—often separate from their parents and children—came to the United States for the “thrill” of it all.
Like a few 12 year olds I know, Bachmann is not eager to take responsibility for her mistakes. Speaking to the right-wing radio host, Laura Ingraham, she blamed her mistakes about where the Revolutionary War began—mistakes she made in two separate speeches--were reported solely because of the “double standard in the media … as we know all 3,400 members of the mainstream media are part of the Obama press contingent.” How badly off is Michele Bachmann when it comes to blaming the media for her mistakes? Let me put it this way. Sarah Palin seems to be telling her to lay off. “It doesn’t do any good to whine,” Palin told her pal Greta Van Susteren. (It’s like having Mr. Sheen show up at your door for an addiction intervention.)
Lest you think Bachmann is just having a bad month or so, the last time my Daily Beast editors embarrassed me into examining her record, I discovered that she had blamed the "Hoot-Smalley Tariff," allegedly passed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for causing the Depression, ignoring the fact that a) it was passed under Republican Herbert Hoover; and b) the Depression was already in full swing when FDR was elected years later.
Then there was that “interesting coincidence” she professed to discover during the swine flu scare at the beginning of Obama’s term--“that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter.”
Bachmann rather generously insisted that she's “not blaming this on President Obama” or the Democrats. It was just sort of you know, “interesting.” Thing is, the last outbreak had taken place not under Carter, but under Republican Gerald Ford. (To be fair to Bachmann, you need to be in about ninth grade to have gotten that far in American history.)
One could cite such examples almost indefinitely. OK one more: Global warming is “all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax," says climatologist Bachmann. But here’s my point. What does it say about our national media that this woman is considered a serious person? What is she doing being taken seriously on Meet the Press? Why in the world does ABC’s George Stephanopoulos think it important to find out whether she’s a fan—I kid you not—of Lady Gaga?
And how can any reporter expect anyone, anytime to take him or her seriously if they treat the “Bachmann for President” boomlet as anything but a symbol of a political system that has run itself off the rails of sanity?
Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress and media columnist for The Nation. His most recent book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama.
TID BITS
A news tidbit found just days ago
America, which has 5 percent of the worlds’ population … has twenty plus percent of those in jail. We exceed China, Russia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and any Third World country in the numbers and percentage of our citizens incarcerated. Why do we think this is so????
Another Tid Bit –
Across country, GOP pushes photo ID at the polls
By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press Mike Baker, Associated Press – Fri Mar 25, 7:07 pm ET
RALEIGH, N.C. – Empowered by last year's elections, Republican leaders in about half the states are pushing to require voters to show photo ID at the polls despite little evidence of fraud and already-substantial punishments for those who vote illegally.Democrats claim the moves will disenfranchise poor and minority voters — many of whom traditionally vote for their candidates. The measures will also increase spending and oversight in some states even as Republicans are focused on cutting budgets and decreasing regulations.
Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, a Republican, said he believes his state's proposed photo ID law will increase citizen confidence in the process and combat fraud that could be going undetected.
"I can't figure out who it would disenfranchise," Hargett said. "The only people I can think it disenfranchises is those people who might be voting illegally."
Hargett said the measure currently moving through Tennessee's legislature — now controlled by Republicans — would accommodate people who don't have IDs by having them sign oaths of identity, which provide more prominent warning to potential fakers than the standard name-signing.
Party leaders advanced several ID proposals this week with successful votes in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Ohio and Texas.
About half of states are considering measures to create or strengthen ID requirements this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many are considering stringent controls that would mirror laws in Georgia and Indiana, which require voters who don't have photo ID at the polls to return to election offices within days and produce that kind of identification in order to get their votes counted.
In the South, the issue comes with a burden of history for black residents who recall past barriers to voting such as violence, literacy tests and other methods. The Voting Rights Act still requires a number of Southern states to get Justice Department approval of redistricting efforts to ensure that minorities' voting strength is upheld.
William Barber, president of North Carolina's chapter of the NAACP, said the photo ID measure amounts to "nothing but nuanced, 21st Century Jim Crow."
Henry Frye recalled the literacy test he failed in 1956, after he'd returned from serving in the Air Force and tried to register to vote. One of the questions asked him to name a U.S. president — the 13th, if he remembers correctly.
Frye, who eventually became North Carolina's first black Supreme Court justice, spent 14 years as a lawmaker in the General Assembly and focused much of his time trying to make it easier for people to register and vote. He said the photo ID measure appears to be a first step back in the wrong direction.
"I think we need to do what we can to encourage voting rather than discourage voting," Frye said.
Elections officials in North Carolina said most of the voting fraud allegations they investigate turn out to be unfounded. Over the past five years, the state has referred about 350 cases to district attorneys for investigation, mostly in cases of felons who cast a ballot without first getting their voting rights restored. There are more than six million registered voters in the state.
States already have ways to check the identity of voters when they register and when they go to cast a ballot. North Carolina's current law requires residents to provide documents proving their name and address in order to register to vote. Those who register improperly can be charged with a felony.
At the polls, North Carolina voters must declare their valid name and address in order to get their ballot. Impersonating another registered voter is also a felony, as is voting more than once in an election.
In Georgia, which has had a strict voter ID law on the books for years, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said he's not aware of anyone caught committing fraud. He argues that the rules help prevent people who try to file improper votes from having them counted.
Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said he's not aware of anyone caught committing fraud because of the law but argued that it has helped make elections more secure.
Kemp said about two-thirds of people who cast provisional ballots because of missing photo IDs — there were about 1,200 during the 2008 presidential election — do not return to election offices. He suspects those people either knew the outcome of the election and didn't feel the need to confirm their vote, or they were trying to commit fraud. He doesn't see any signs that minorities or any other people are participating less because of the law.
"I don't think it's created any kind of burden for our citizens," Kemp said.
Estimated costs vary for states to implement the changes and provide picture IDs for those who don't already have a driver's license or other qualifying identification. North Carolina estimates a cost of more than $3 million in the first year and about $400,000 each year going forward. Missouri estimates that a proposal in that state could also cost millions. Texas would spend $2 million in the coming year to implement the law there.
Tennessee's law wouldn't require the state to provide IDs, so Hargett believes the cost would be minimal.
Many of the state efforts are coming due to increased GOP influence, as Republicans now control 25 state legislatures and 29 governor's offices. In Kansas, for example, the GOP-controlled Legislature approved a photo ID bill three years ago but then-Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius vetoed it. The state's new Republican governor, Sam Brownback, supports the photo ID rules, which are advancing through the Legislature now.
South Carolina is moving forward to require photo IDs, strengthening a law which already requires voters to show either driver's licenses, voter registration cards or DMV-issued ID cards. The topic has been racially divisive in Mississippi for years and will now be on the ballot as an initiative after a petition authored by a Republican lawmaker got enough signatures. The new Republican majority in the Alabama Legislature is hoping to push a photo ID law through after years of discussing it.
"I think most citizens think it's common sense," Kemp said. "I think it's important for people, not only from a fraud perspective, but to make sure that people have confidence in the system."
My personal opinion, even if you’re not interested (or can’t figure out where I stand) – is that these proposals reek of Jim Crow. They appear nothing more that reworked poll taxes.
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