Inside the financial lives of Financial Services Committee members
By Tony Mecia March 7 at 2:59 PM Tony Mecia, a former senior writer at the Weekly Standard, is business journalist in Charlotte.
As you might expect from a panel of 60 lawmakers with different backgrounds and ages, their personal financial pictures range from those with substantial assets to younger members with hardly any savings. But if you pore through the most recent public financial disclosures of the committee’s Democrats and Republicans, as I did recently, you’ll see that they have a mixed record when it comes to their personal finances and investments.
Yet a startling number of committee members reported owing one of the worst kinds of debt, credit card debt. Eleven members, or nearly 1 in 5, said they owed $10,000 or more on credit cards. Owing money to credit card companies isn’t inherently shameful: Consumers might do it when in a financial pinch, and small businesses use cards as a routine source of capital. About 40 percent of U.S. households carry a balance.
Shhh, don’t tell their progressive base, but three committee Democrats — William Lacy Clay of Missouri, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Dean Phillips of Minnesota — reported owning stock in the tobacco company Philip Morris. On the other side of the aisle, freshman Rep. Anthony Gonzalez reported holding stock in companies that are occasional targets of the right, including Nike, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet.
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