Pastor, who said the key to his financial good fortune was simply watching what he spends and paying off debts, does not consider himself rich. Indeed, within the gilded halls of Congress, where the median net worth is $913,000 and climbing, he is not. He is a rank-and-file millionaire. But compared with the country at large, where the median net worth is $100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004, he and most of his fellow lawmakers are true aristocrats.
Largely insulated from the economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress - many of them among the “1 percenters’’ decried by Occupy Wall Street protesters - have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the past six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich.
But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.
The wealth gap may go largely unnoticed in good times.
“But with the American public feeling all this economic pain, people just resent it more,’’ said Alan J. Ziobrowski, a professor at Georgia State who studied lawmakers’ stock investments.
There is wide debate about just why the wealth gap appears to be growing. For starters, the prohibitive costs of political campaigning may discourage the less affluent from even considering a run for Congress. Beyond that, loose ethics controls, members’ shrewd stock picks, profitable land deals, favorable tax laws, inheritances, and even marriages to wealthy spouses are all cited as possible explanations for the rising fortunes on Capitol Hill.
What is clear is that members of Congress are getting richer compared not only to the average American worker but even to other very rich Americans.
