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House Speaker Mike Johnson is much less wealthy than other members of Congress.
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He does not trade any stocks and has a home mortgage between $250,000 and $500,000.
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He has earned over $120,000 by teaching online classes at Liberty University since 2018.
The new Speaker of the House is not as wealthy as most of his colleagues.
This is perhaps the greatest insight we can glean from the eight years of financial disclosures filed by Representative Mike Johnson since 2016, when he first ran to represent Louisiana’s 4th congressional district.
All members of Congress are required to file annual financial disclosures in which they detail their assets, any loans they have taken out, any gifts they have received and any income they have made over and above their $174,000 salary.
We know this based on documents filed by Johnson.
He does not own or trade any stocks
From 2016 to 2022, Johnson did not disclose ownership or trading of any individual stocks – or even other securities like mutual funds.
This is a sharp contrast to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose frequent and massive business dealings with her husband Paul raised the eyebrows of journalists and ethics experts.
As Insider’s Conflicted Congressional Investigation found in 2021, lawmakers often face a variety of conflicts of interest arising from their stock holdings, given that they have access to non-public information and They can influence national policy. Late disclosures and other violations of the STOCK Act are common, and lawmakers often face a slap on the wrist for doing so.
However, Johnson appears to have not commented publicly on the ongoing effort to ban members of Congress from stock trading, leaving the public unsure where he stands on the issue.
Has a home mortgage up to $500,000
Since 2013, Johnson and his wife Kelly have held a home mortgage between $250,000 and $500,000 from Citizens National Bank.
That’s not all that different from former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who disclosed a mortgage of between $100,000 and $250,000 on his California home.
While mortgages are relatively common for homeowners across the country, they are not as common for members of Congress. In 2020, OpenSecrets reported that most MPs at the time were millionaires.
In addition to the mortgage, Johnson had other debts, including a personal loan and a home equity line of credit from Citizens Bank, both of which were worth between $15,000 and $50,000.
He has earned $120,000 from Liberty University since 2018
Johnson has spent the past five years teaching online courses at Liberty University, and has slowly been making more money from the program each year.
He earned $10,600 in 2018, $26,200 in 2019 and 2020, and over $29,000 in 2021 and 2022. In total, he has disclosed earnings of $122,485 from the job.
There is little publicly available information about Johnson’s activities at the university, and Insider has contacted the university for more information. But according to a biography on the website Answers in Genesis, the congressman has taught “the Constitution and free enterprise” at the university’s Helms School of Government.
He earned about the same amount before Congress – but now he’s become speaker and is about to get a $50,000 raise.
Before coming to Congress, Johnson was a practicing attorney and member of the Louisiana House of Representatives—a part-time job in that state.
As a House candidate in 2016, Johnson disclosed earning a $128,316 salary from a Kitchen law firm on top of his mere $25,000 salary as a state representative. Combining this with an additional $18,000 from his own practice, he made just over $171,000 – which is not too far from his current $174,000.
But now that he’s speaker, Johnson is set to get a $50,000 raise: While all typical House members and senators make $174,000, the Speaker of the House makes $223,500.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Source: news.yahoo.com
