In other words, most Congress members are well insulated from the economic results of their votes -- except for the part where they use their votes to fatten their own bank accounts. While their financial status may appear to be irrelevant, it's not. They're so insulated from anyone who isn't wealthy -- or a lobbyist - that many of them have no idea at all what the rest of us are dealing with:

The wealthiest one-third of lawmakers were largely immune from the Great Recession, taking the fewest financial hits and watching their investments quickly recover and rise to new heights. But more than 20 percent of the members of the current Congress — 121 lawmakers — appeared to be worse off in 2010 than they had been six years earlier, and 24 saw their reported wealth slide into negative territory.

Welcome to our world, tiny group of Congress members!

Most members weathered the financial crisis better than the average American, who saw median household net worth drop 39 percent from 2007 to 2010. The median estimated wealth of members of the current Congress rose 5 percent during the same period, according to their reported assets and liabilities. The wealthiest one-third of Congress gained 14 percent.

I'm sure all that perfectly legal insider information comes in handy.

Because lawmakers are allowed to report their holdings and debts in broad ranges, it is impossible for the public to determine their precise net worth. They also are not required to reveal the value of their homes, the salaries of their spouses or money kept in non-interest-bearing bank accounts and their congressional retirement plan.

For its analysis, The Post used the midpoint of the range of each reported holding and tracked the figures over time to determine whether the relative wealth of lawmakers had increased or declined between 2004 and 2010. Previous studies of congressional wealth have looked at Congress as a whole, rather than tracking the financial trend for each individual lawmaker. The Post created an in-depth financial portrait of each member of Congress.

Among the findings:

●The estimated wealth of Republicans was 44 percent higher than Democrats in 2004, but that disparity has virtually disappeared.
●The number of millionaires in Congress dropped after the Great Recession; the 253 who have served during the current session are the smallest group since 2004. The numbers are likely to be underestimated because lawmakers are not required to list their homes among their assets.
●Between 2004 and 2010, 72 lawmakers appeared to have doubled their estimated wealth.
●At least 150 lawmakers reported receiving more income from outside jobs and investments than from their congressional salaries of $174,000 for rank-and-file members.
●Representatives in 2010 had a median estimated wealth of $746,000; senators had $2.6 million.
●Since 2004, lawmakers reported more than 3,500 outside jobs paying their spouses more than $1,000 a year. The lawmakers are not required to report how much the spouses are paid or what they did for the money.
●Lawmakers’ wealth is held in a variety of ways: 127 primarily in real estate, 117 in institutional funds, 75 in their spouses’ names, 51 in essentially cash, 36 in specific stocks and bonds, 32 in high-turnover trading, 30 in business ownership and 20 in agriculture. More than 40 had reported assets of $25,000 or less.

The Post also found that some congressional financial interests intersected with public actions taken by legislators: 73 lawmakers sponsored or co-sponsored legislation that could have benefitted businesses or industries in which either they or their families were involved or invested.

The article reads like a vacation brochure for very, very wealthy dudes:

Bermuda:

“To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as ‘a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’… Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in ‘jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,’ as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.”

Cayman Islands:

Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.

Switzerland:

These, plus the mandatory financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released last August, raise many questions. A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities… The media soon noticed Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens. A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it.

Canary Islands, El Salvador, Panama, Shadowy Rich Guys

Private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the ‘14 families’ oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—‘one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a U.S. Customs official once put it. Bain Capital has said it did everything required by the U.S. government to check that the investors were not associated with unsavory interests. U.S. law doesn’t require Bain to enforce the tax laws of its investors’ home countries, but the presence of Swiss trustees, Bahamas trusts, and Panama corporations would raise red flags with any tax authority.

Go read it and then ask yourself why he's not releasing more tax returns. I think you'll find the answer in that article.

On its face, this would indicate that not only does Mitt Romney have no problem hiding his tax returns from voters, but he also has reasons to hide his tax returns from voters.

When is a blind trust not a blind trust?

A blind trust is not a blind trust when there is direct or indirect control over investment decisions. While Romney has nominally placed his investments in a trust which is managed by someone else, the person he has chosen to manage those investments is his close associate and personal attorney. That is not a blind trust under federal law. It is a trust managed by a close personal friend and advisor.

This is important because it means Romney can coordinate investment decisions which on their face might be potential conflicts of interests. Here's an example. In March, the Obama campaign hammered Romney about his "tough-on-China rhetoric", after Romney started criticizing the administration over it's alleged "softness" on Chinese human rights abuses.

Yet even as he was proclaiming that, he had a six-figure investment in a Bain Capital fund which owns Chinese video surveillance company.

Either way you cut it, there's a conflict. On the one hand, Romney is full of puffery over his indignation at human rights abuses in China and on the other, he's got a substantial investment in a company which enables human rights abuses.

Another example of Romney's hypocrisy with regard to China is the relationship between his investments and his policy declarations. A look at Romney's record alongside his financial disclosures indicates that he was for China before he was against them, and his investment record aligns with that. In late 2011, Romney's campaign rhetoric took a hard turn against Chinese trade practices. Just before that, he divested himself of $1.5 million in Chinese investments.

It is not a blind trust when one decides to make a policy stand but unloads one's investments just ahead of that stand. And it's here that I will note Romney's modus operandi. "I'm running for office, for Pete's sake! I can't have [illegal immigrants, Chinese investments, etc] working for me!"

When a blind trust is really a blind trust

Under federal law, Mitt Romney has two options with regard to his assets. He can either create a blind trust which actually creates a firewall between Romney and his money by putting all of his assets under the management of a completely unrelated third party with no conflict of interest or relationship with Romney, or he can liquidate all of his investments and place them in neutral investments such as Treasury notes.

Divestiture is the route President Obama appears to have taken. According to his financial disclosures at Open Secrets, the bulk of his money was invested in Treasury bonds, with some retirement funds held in index mutual funds, which are permissible because he has no control over how those mutual funds are invested. Those disclosures go all the way back to his initial candidacy filing and are consistent.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, promises to create a federal blind trust if he is elected. Until then, he'd like for everyone to believe he is not accountable for Bain Capital's actions because, well, he had everything held in a blind trust. Right?

About that Bain Capital Relationship...

Romney's newly-released financial disclosures indicate that he received almost $2 million in income from Bain Capital which were treated as "carried interest" payments. Carried interest payments, you might recall, are taxed at a rate of 15 percent, unlike other income which has a maximum tax rate of 28 percent.

Boston.com:

In his latest federal financial disclosure, filed last week, Romney's trustee revealed that the candidate made $1.9 million from a single "Bain Capital Inc." payment as well as more than $200,000 from three other Bain entities. Although Romney's retirement agreement with Bain expired in 2009, the trustee said the income came in the form of "true-up" payments -- in essence, catch-up payments made to make up for earnings not provided to Romney before the entities ceased operation.

None of the Bain entities had previously been listed on Romney's 2011 financial disclosure.

So here's what we're being asked to believe. First, Romney's relationship with Bain ended in 1999 and there was no arrangement for any further consulting or other services with them. Second, Romney's retirement agreement expired in 2009 and with it, all preferred tax treatment on Bain Capital distributions, since Romney would ostensibly have provided no services to Bain to justify giving him a "piece of carry", which is how it's referred to. Third, suddenly two investments pop up out of nowhere with Bain which do not cause any prior year's tax returns to be amended or disclosures changed, but payments from them represent some sort of adjustment for prior services which are as yet undisclosed.

Isn't the simpler explanation that Romney still has an active, vibrant ongoing relationship with Bain Capital, and that his current investments are not being held in a trust with any sort of firewall standing between Romney and investment decisions for those trusts? And if that is the explanation, then we also have to understand that Mitt Romney has many, many conflicts of interest, that he should be accountable for Bain Capital's vulture capitalism activities, and most importantly, Mitt Romney wouldn't know the truth if it stood in front of him with a big sign painted on its chest.

This is the wonky installment of Mitt Romney's Ethics Problems. Stay tuned for the creepy installment, which will be coming shortly.

Dick Armey is so aggravated with us stupid Americans for liking Social Security that he sat down at his computer and wrote an op-ed trying to talk us all out of it.

Social Security already is the largest tax that most Americans pay. Studies have shown that payroll taxes would need to increase by 50% in order to temporarily save the insolvent program. But what happens when that's not enough? At what point does Social Security become generational theft?

Funny how that savings thing becomes a "tax" unless it's invested in "private" investments, eh?

Americans should ask, if Social Security is such a great program, why is it mandatory? Workers should have the choice about whether they want to remain in the current system or invest in a personal saving retirement account, which would allow them to have complete control over their retirements funds and pass the remaining balance to family members. Let's have Social Security compete against other investment options.

Because that worked so well for everyone who had 401(k) money invested in 2008, right? Imagine the disaster that would have befallen seniors all over the country when their otherwise-reliable pension payment became half of its former self.

Social Security isn't going anywhere, and if I have anything to say about it, the Social Security Retirement Age can stay right where it is. The only tweak they should make is lifting the cap on contributions. In fact, they could lift that cap and drop the rate a percentage point if they wanted. That should ensure solvency through the end of this century or so.

Paul Krugman explains why we can't settle for stabilizing the economy, and says unless there's a bigger economic stimulus package, high unemployment is here to stay for a long, long time:

The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us. Solid growth will continue only if private spending takes up the baton as the effect of the stimulus fades. And so far there’s no sign that this is happening.

So the government needs to do much more. Unfortunately, the political prospects for further action aren’t good.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

But can we afford to do more? We can’t afford not to.

High unemployment doesn’t just punish the economy today; it punishes the future, too. In the face of a depressed economy, businesses have slashed investment spending — both spending on plant and equipment and “intangible” investments in such things as product development and worker training. This will hurt the economy’s potential for years to come.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

O.K., I know I’m being impractical: major economic programs can’t pass Congress without the support of relatively conservative Democrats, and these Democrats have been telling reporters that they have lost their appetite for stimulus.

But I hope their stomachs start rumbling soon. We now know that stimulus works, but we aren’t doing nearly enough of it. For the sake of today’s unemployed, and for the sake of the nation’s future, we need to do much more.

abu muqawama: From the Dept. of People Who Need to Go Away

American Street: One of the biggest enemies our troops face in Iraq seems to be our own military contractors.

State of the Day: J. Sidney McCain lll says America's neighborhoods are like Baghdad

Consortiumblog: Bush, Columbia, and Narco-politics

Slate: Corporate America's long-term investments in the federal judiciary are yielding impressive returns.

Halfway There: Praise the Lord...and pass the ammunition

Download | play Download | play (thanks to BillW)

What a horrible, terrible, very bad, no good day Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) is having. Facing questions about ethics over some Nicaraguan investments, Weller announced this morning the old stand by of wanting to spend more time with his family and opting not to run again.

If Weller had hoped that taking his ball and going home would stop the questions about his ethical failings, he was wrong. Chicago's CBS2 Political Editor Mike Flannery followed after Weller to get a statement on his investments in Nicaragua. The raw video is hard to make out, but Flannery is claiming that one of Weller's aides pushed him down the stairs and into a woman in the stairwell. He has said he will press charges.

If you’ve been following the news, you’ve no doubt seen recent reports about the frustrating, and so far unsuccessful, search for six trapped miners at the Crandall Canyon Mine in Huntington, Utah. Rescue teams have been drilling where they hope the miners might be, but it’s largely been guesswork.

It’s not a political issue, per se, but the NYT ran an editorial today about Republican policies failed to take important steps on mine safety.

For too long, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress allowed mine operators to put off making needed investments to ensure their workers’ safety. And last year when a string of coal-mining disasters — that killed 48 miners — forced Congress to enact new safety legislation, it still gave companies far too much time to install communications systems that might have helped find the Utah miners.

Dems have proposed forcing mine operators to adopt, quickly, emergency communications systems that could track and communicate with workers in the event of an accident. Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration have opposed the Democrats’ efforts. It’s another example of what Rick Perlstein has labeled “E. coli conservatism.”

I think it's important to remember that there's a whole world out there while the media focuses solely on Beltway politics. Here's a chance for you to encourage responsibility and humanity from American corporations (don't snicker) for Darfur

I think we may need to keep a list on who actually isn't indicted:

Lester Crawford, the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who resigned suddenly in September 2005, was indicted in U.S. court for making false statements related to his investments and conflict of interest. U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor announced the indictment in a court filing today in Washington.