What do you do when you offer a toast to the Queen of England in front of a hundred people and everyone ignores you? Like our Buffoon in Chief, you realize you have made an ass of yourself, put your glass down and wait until their national anthem is finished.
While most of us suspected that Congressional members have an “in” to some easy money, it appears those ties between Congress and Wall Street run deeper and more intimate than most of us feared. A new study, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives”, released this week in the Business and Politics journal, (part of the Berkeley Electronic Press) focused on the higher percentages of stock earnings by 300 House members as compared to private investors with no access to non public information. The jaw dropping results revealed abnormally consistent stock successes that, over a period of decades with even a modest market, could net the elite Congressional members millions in portfolio earnings.
Arguably the most consistent practice on the part of democrats and this administration is to avoid doing the necessary and important things.
Democrats have a long history of avoiding the really important issues. They denied anything was wrong at Fannie and Freddie and hijacked every effort to reform the GSE’s all the while the country was circling the bottom of the toilet. They have failed to produce a budget for more than 700 days. Democrats blocked George Bush’s effort to reform Social Security, but had nothing better to offer either then or now. Bush’s effort to reform Social Security died because Bush had the audacity to insist that the Social Security system be solvent over the long term. Bush did not want to play kick the can down the road.
