King Hammurabi of Babylon had a simple rule for home builders: if the house you built collapsed and killed its owner, you were put to death.
That was law #229, carved in stone almost 4,000 years ago. And some version of this rule has existed for most of human history. Even to this day, it’s a tradition among architects to spend the night under a bridge they designed to prove that it’s safe.
Bottom line, people who built things were often expected to eat their own cooking and suffer the successes and consequences of their work.
The United States Congress has spent decades perfecting the opposite arrangement.
Start with the salary. Members of Congress earn $174,000 a year, more than double what the median American household makes. Yet Congress would like you to know how painful that is.
Senator Tommy Tuberville calls the job a “sacrifice.” Representative Pramila Jayapal complains that “most of us get paid less than our chiefs [of staff] at this point.”
Current and former members are suing the government, demanding retroactive cost-of-living raises, with claims as high as $420,000 apiece.
Bear in mind, again, that Congressmen already make $174,000 per year. Yet the House of Representatives averages just 150 days in session per year. And last year’s legislative calendar scheduled just 137 days.
Most Americans work at least 250 days a year. So, adjusting for actual days worked, Congressmen are actually earning nearly $300,000 based on a normal work year. So the pay gap between everyday Americans and their Congressional representatives is even greater than at first glance.
And just how do they fill their 150ish work days? The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee once handed its incoming freshmen a model schedule:
Four hours of the day went to fundraising calls. Another hour to something called “strategic outreach”, i.e. being aligned with the party bosses. The actual job of representing constituents gets, maybe, 3-4 hours per day.
By the party’s own math, half of a congressman’s day goes to keeping the job rather than doing it.
This is insane. A welder doesn’t get to spend half of his day persuading people to let him keep his job; rather, if he doesn’t want to get fired, he simply has to do a good job. Pretty simple.
But members of Congress can’t run on their records, because their record is the insane world that we all live in.
So they spend their days telling lies to donors in order to raise enough money to tell more lies in TV commercials and email blasts. Anywhere else, this cascade of lies would be considered criminal fraud. In politics it’s just campaigning.
And in a few weeks, those campaign pitches will even receive a special pass around Gmail’s inbox filter: starting September 8, 2026, Google will let verified political committees bypass it entirely, just in time for the midterms. Your inbox has rules; their fundraising has an exemption.
But the exemptions don’t stop there.
Thanks to Congress, Americans are required by law to have some overpriced health insurance plan. But politicians have a special plan, with taxpayers footing the vast majority of the premium… plus coverage for life once a member qualifies for retirement after serving just FIVE years in Congress.
So the same people who built the most unaffordable healthcare system in the world exempted themselves from ever feeling the pain.
Pensions repeat the pattern: members elected before 2013 earn a pension that accrues nearly twice as fast as a regular federal worker’s, collectible as early as 50. They let Social Security drift toward insolvency for you. For themselves, they built a backup.
Then there’s the stock trading. A corporate executive who trades on confidential information goes to prison. Congress never bothered to apply those rules to itself until the 2012 STOCK Act.
That might explain how former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went from a roughly $3 million net worth when she entered Congress in 1987 to an estimated $280 million today. It’s all apparently due to her husband’s extreme investment prowess.
But she’s far from the only one. Must all be a wild coincidence.
Even after the 2012 STOCK Act which required politicians to disclose their stock trades, nothing changed. Seventy-eight members broke that law in a single term— yet in the fourteen years since the STOCK Act, not a single one has been prosecuted for insider trading.
Even Speaker Mike Johnson says, “Look, at least let them, like, engage in some stock trading, so that they can continue to, you know, take care of their family.”
Imagine the private-sector version: if JP Morgan announced a new campus in Texas and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, bought up the surrounding land to sell to his own company, he’d be indicted before the concrete cured.
Congress runs that trade every day, on information you’ll never see, and calls it “taking care of their family”.
Then you’ve got their housing perks.
Representatives can bill taxpayers for their living costs in Washington DC— up to $276 a night for lodging, plus a $92 meal allowance.
What’s interesting is that this is a recent adjustment going back to just 2023. Congressmen were ‘suffering’ the worst inflation in four decades. Rather than acknowledge that they themselves were instrumental in creating that inflation, they cooked up a bailout for themselves so that they wouldn’t have to pay sky-high prices.
In short, you pay higher living costs. Congressmen bill you for theirs.
Congressmen also routinely get sweetheart deals from banks and mortgage brokers; during the 2008 financial crisis, for example, America’s largest housing lender at the time ran a VIP program that waived fees and cut prices on home loans for politicians and key staffers.
Everyone else pays the going rate— 6% to 7% today. Politicians get special terms, and I’m sure there are no strings attached.
An organization that never feels its own failures has no reason to fix them. The debt, the inflation, and the fraud keep compounding no matter who wins.
Hammurabi figured out the fix 4,000 years ago: make the builder liable for his own construction. Congress has spent decades making sure the roof always comes down on somebody else.
