Capitol Hill’s Roll Call has released its list of 2011’s richest members of Congress. Is your devoted “public servant” on it? If not, don’t lose hope. Half the people in Congress are millionaires. (Only 1% of all Americans are millionaires.) CBS reported the precise number in Congress last November: 261. Actually, I once heard somewhere that everyone in Congress is, at minimum, a millionaire. But you know how accountants and spin doctors work. Hell, accountants are spin doctors.
Is it any wonder the politicians spend most of their time fighting each other to keep their jobs? I don’t know, maybe it’s not cause and effect. Maybe it takes a millionaire to run for office and get elected in the first place. But I have a tough time believing that every wingnut who decides to run is already rich. Seems to me the promise of wealth and fame and a national platform would be and has been quite a magnet. (There were a mere 16 presidential candidates on Colorado’s 2008 ballot.) Forget altruism. This is a road to fame and fortune. Sometimes you don’t even have to win to cash in. Just ask Sarah Palin.
So, whatever happened to getting elected in order to serve the people? Just another quaint old-fashioned notion, I suppose. I have a lot of those.
The Libertarian Party has a poll going (How should we deal with the financial problems of the Social Security system?), and I couldn’t help but wish that one of the choices had been to force the members of Congress to pay back the money they’d stolen from the SS Trust Fund to funnel into their own pet projects…
No kidding. Don’t talk to me about cutting back entitlements until you’ve put back all the money that was supposed to fund our entitlements, not the government’s excess spending.
OMG my Dad said the exact same thing a week and a half ago.
Ya and we’re stuck trying to decide who to vote into office; the dishonest, the more dishonest, or the most dishonest.