Birmingham Blues

You know how our Alabama Republican senators like to vote against expanded SCHIP or give only token support for home mortgage borrowers left to twist in the wind? They’re all about the little people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Because, clearly, that’s what they’ve been doing themselves.

The Sunlight Foundation has taken a look at the change in average net worth for our Congresspeople between 1995 and 2006, and I thought y’all might be interested to see how well our Alabama senators have done while drawing taxpayer-funded salaries, sitting in taxpayer-funded offices, working with taxpayer-funded staff, and using taxpayer-funded health care.

(Click here to look at the methodology. As the Sunlight Foundation points out, reporting requirements for members of Congress are pretty lax; they can report the value of assets, debts, and income across broad ranges — see Shelby’s numbers below — and they don’t have to include the value of their personal residence.)

Jeff Sessions

• average net worth 1995 $545,253 (range $196,348 to $894, 159)
• average net worth 2006 $2,061,030 (range $1,066,060 to $3,056,000)
• approximately 278% increase

Richard Shelby

• average net worth 1995 $7,905,587 (range $-23,108,270 to $38,919,444)
• average net worth 2006 $20,469,011 (range $5,243,021 to $35,695,001)
• approximately 159% increase

Average American family (includes value of personal residence)

• average net worth 1995 $71,000
• average net worth 2006 $93,000
• approximately 31% increase

Nice work if you can get it.

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Check out your own legislators here (search by state or by name).

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 10:41 am and is filed under Alabama Politics, National Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.