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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

> The new bill would bar Washington officials from owning or trading stocks, even in blind trusts.

Unless you're going to ban congresspersons to hae wealth-- where is the money going to go and what distorting effects will that have -- and will it be superior to the problems of (say) having a blind trust that just holds market indices?

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It goes into a blind trust or an index fund.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/349...

Indeed, wtf. the article seems to directly contradict the bill text.

I don't see anything wrong with them owning total (US) market indices.

Take greenhouse gas emissions for example: if we had acted more aggressively in the past, we might have mitigated a lot of the climate change we're seeing today. But it would have impacted the stock market, and every senator/congressperson would have lost money personally by backing those initiatives. So, today, now we have record temperatures as the norm, ie, we're not shocked when every third Tuesday we see a record temperature and extreme weather event

I think that's a stretch.

Energy is 4.5% of the S&P.

Even if they weren't invested directly in Exxon they would not want to be associated with killing an industry and the jobs that go with it.

They could have made money backing green energy just as easily anyway.

> Unless you're going to ban congresspersons to hae wealth

BASED

If you care more about personal wealth than the American people you shouldn't be running for public office.

There are so many different investments other than stocks.

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