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?

Posted in

Jim Vicevich

Jim is a veteran broadcaster and conservative/libertarian blogger with more than 25 years experience in TV and radio. Jim's was the long-term host of The Jim Vicevich Show on WTIC 1080 in Hartford from 2004 through 2019. Prior to radio, Jim worked as a business and financial reporter for NBC30 - the NBC owned TV station in Hartford - and as business editor at WFSB-TV in Hartford for 14 years while earning six Emmy nominations and three Telly Awards.

2 Comments

  1. Dimsdale on July 16, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    Public "servants" give us the same service that the bull gives the cow.



  2. ryalso on July 17, 2009 at 8:11 am

    Public “servants” give us the same service that the bull gives the cow.

    hopefully the cow can at least enjoy it – none of us do

    this is unconscionable – just one more in a long line of perks for the ruling class

    where's the tar and feathers?



The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.

You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.

The site is not broken.