And the rich get richer … Washington style

This article went pretty much unnoticed a couple days ago, but I noticed. There’s a move in DC by some courageous members of Congress to close a loophole in the law that my guess has helped line the pockets of our “public servants” for decades …

While federal laws aim to restrict insider trading in the corporate world, neither securities law nor ethics rules prevent congressional lawmakers and their staffs from benefiting financially from the non-public information they gather from their daily routines on the Hill. That loophole, studies reveal, has allowed lawmakers to reap significantly higher Wall Street returns than other investors.

And before you stat screaming “damn Dems” … it’s some Democratic lawmakers that are going after the loophole.

On Monday, some Democratic lawmakers took another small step toward ending that practice, holding the first public hearing on a three-year-old bill to close the congressional insider-trading loophole. Though mired in the complexities of securities law and the politics of a Congress that doesn’t much like policing itself, the bill at its root asks a simple question: Should members of Congress and their staffs have investing privileges that the rest of the country doesn’t?

Interesting, when you consider the latest example of this kind of “Coincidence trading” occurred on the Democrat side:

As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Well, we know what chance this bill has, don’t we?

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