Mike Johnson Whines About $174,000 Salary To Justify Stock Trades For Congress

There's a lot of concern right now over potential insider trading because we have a lot of people very close to Donald Trump that sold a lot of their stocks right before he was announcing the tariffs for Liberation Day. And we've got news that Mike Johnson has now stated that Congress needs to be able to trade stocks because $174,000 a year, more than a hundred thousand dollars more than the average family makes in a year, is not enough to support a family.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So we've got news that Mike Johnson has now stated that Congress needs to be able to trade stocks to feed their families.

Yeah. We've got all of this concern right now over potential insider trading because we have a lot of people very close to Donald Trump that sold a lot of their stocks right before he was announcing the tariffs for Liberation Day. Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of 'em. Pam Bondi, the attorney General is one of 'em, that just came out within the last week or two. So insider trading with members of Congress, members of the administration, big in the news right now. So Mike Johnson wants to get ahead of it, even though he is already way far behind it and he comes out and he says, listen, we're just humble members of Congress here, okay? We make a living just like everybody else. $174,000 a year is our salary. We can't eat on that. We can't support a family.

If we want to be able to have any kind of a life, we have to trade stocks, which doesn't sit well with the American public as a vast majority of them want Congress to not be involved in any kind of stock trading. But this is the levels to which these people have sunk. Trying to first argue that $174,000 a year, more than a hundred thousand dollars more than the average family makes in a year, is not enough to support a family. They have better healthcare in Congress, cheaper healthcare. They get stipends for food, for travel, for lodging in DC. So that 174 base salary doesn't include the tens of thousands of dollars in perks per year that they receive. And to argue that we basically have to engage in insider trading or else we can't survive, that is an insult to every single working class family in this country.

They certainly could hold stock in a blind trust where they don't know what it's being invested in. So I don't think anybody wants them to lose all stock options and go into the poor house. But the idea that you're actively trading when you sit on an intelligence agency or when you know that there's a tariff coming against this country, so buy that stock, sell that stock. And I can't think of any job in the world, much less in America where you have a high 60% disapproval where 65% of your bosses think you're bad at your job and you're saying, I don't get paid enough.

Yeah. I mean, if you were to go survey your staff right now and 65% came back and said, Caleb, we just don't like you, we don't think you're doing a good job. You would internalize that and be like, wow. What am I doing that is so awful? His staff would absolutely not say that about him. He's a great guy. But Congress doesn't look at that, or they don't think about it, right? They look, okay, well people don't like what I'm doing, so what the hell? I'm just gonna be even more corrupt and stupid because I know in two years I'm gonna go back to them. I'm gonna give them the same flowery pitch. I'm gonna say, oh, gotta watch out for Nancy Pelosi over here. She's so evil. And they'll vote for me again and they do. That's the problem. It's not just that these people in DC are so corrupt that they do this out in the open with the insider trading, beating the market, by the way, sometimes by hundreds of percentage points, some members of Congress do, beat the market returns.

And Democrats get about a 31% higher return on their stocks than the regular market. Republicans are at 29%. So it's almost dead even, according to the most recent report. But the people in these districts that go back to the polls every two years and say, yep, let's send 'em back. Let's send 'em back. Let's send 'em back.