I recently ran across a news article that said 237 or 44% of the members of Congress are millionaires. I had to do a little bit more digging to see what this actually meant. It turns out that the members of the senate, house and executive branch are required to disclose a range for the value of all assets and liabilities. This does not give us an exact metric to base net worth, but it gives us a pretty clear picture of our governing body. The average net worth of our governing elite is $6.3M.
$6.3M net worth for our elite lawmakers
This is not exactly groundbreaking news, but it does help put things in perspective.
What gets slightly more interesting is looking at the two main political parties. It turns out they are pretty evenly matched on the wealth spectrum:
Lawmakers who are democrats are slightly more wealthy than republicans on average
If we look at the distribution of wealth, it seems that the two are fairly evenly matched. More democrats have negative net worth, but edge out republicans in the $500k-$1M bucket.
The distribution of wealth is fairly even between the two parties
Democrats gain the edge when it comes to the super affluent. There are 4 democrats with net worth greater than $200M while there is only 1 republican.
The Super Affluent drag the averages up
Luckily all of these millionaires receive a very nice pension as a gift from their constituents.
Data below:
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