Global Courant 2023-05-14 18:01:33
Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock / Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock
Grant Cardon knows all about being rich – and being poor. The sales trainer, speaker, and entrepreneur is worth an estimated $600 million, but he spent part of his childhood living in poverty. When Cardone graduated from college in 1981, he was $40,000 in debt.
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Given his experience on both ends of the wealth spectrum, Cardone probably has a natural curiosity about why some people get rich and others don’t. That curiosity was shared on Twitter this week when Cardone released the following May 4 tweet: “Can someone explain to me how civil servants (politicians) become multimillionaires with a salary of $100,000?”
Cardone gave no further details about which officials (and millionaires) he was referring to. Presumably his tweet was mainly intended for members of the US Congress. According to a 2020 report from Open Secrets, more than half of the 535 members of Congress are millionaires.
It’s also unclear where Cardone got his $100,000 figure from. The median annual salary of a full-time congressman is $174,000, according to a 2019 report from the Congressional Institute. That’s consistent with more recent Washington Post estimates.
The Speaker of the House earns $223,500 a year, the Congressional Institute noted, while the Senate President pro tempore and Majority and Minority Leaders earn $193,400 each.
Those are excellent salaries – and much higher than the figure Cardone tweeted – but they don’t necessarily make you a millionaire. What they do provide is a nice foundation to build on if you plan to supplement your income while serving in Congress.
According to Open Secrets, there is nothing stopping members of Congress from earning income outside of their official duties. However, there are limitations. For example, they cannot earn more than 15% of the Level II of the Executive Schedule, which determines the pay scale of political appointees in the executive branch. Members must also provide information about the source of both earned and passive income, such as stock dividends.
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Equity investments are a likely source of income for many members of Congress, as they are for the general public. But as The New York Times reported last year, economist Serkan Karadas discovered a “suspicious pattern” of members of Congress earning above-average returns on their stock investments.
Karadas’s findings “suggested that at least some members of Congress benefited from their jobs,” according to the NYT. This may come in the form of inside information about upcoming policy changes or economic shifts that could potentially affect stock performance.
In some cases, congressmen were simply born rich. An example is U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), whose father George was CEO of American Motors before becoming governor of Michigan. Others married wealthy, including former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California).
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Other members of Congress amassed wealth in business before entering government. For example, Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) built a net worth of $300 millionprimarily through the creation of Columbia Hospital Corp., which through a series of acquisitions grew into Columbia/HCA, the world’s largest healthcare provider.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Grant Cardone Asks How Politicians Earning $100,000 Suddenly Become Multimillionaires: Here’s The Harsh Reality
