“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill

📝 Discussion Summary (Click to expand)

The discussion centers around the ethics and systemic issues related to U.S. Congressional members owning and trading stocks. The three most prevalent themes are:

1. Pervasive Corruption through Stock Trading and Conflicts of Interest

There is a strong sentiment that allowing politicians to trade stocks while in office constitutes a form of legalized insider trading that normalizes corruption and regulatory capture. Users point to studies showing leadership outperforms rank-and-file members, directly implying inside knowledge helps investment strategy.

Supporting Quote: One user states, "It’s absolutely disgusting that this sort of Insider Trading has been allowed to continue unchecked, and a significant contributor to the normalization of American corruption and its associated regulatory capture," from user "stego-tech."
Supporting Quote: Another user notes the evidence clearly points to self-enrichment: "By the time you factor in the information you're too late," from user "threatofrain."

2. Proposed Solutions: Divestment and Strict Trading Limitations

The discussion heavily features proposals aimed at removing the conflict of interest by limiting or stopping stock ownership for lawmakers. The most popular suggested fixes involve holding assets in broad-market index funds or complete divestment, often modeled after restrictions placed on private sector employees handling sensitive information.

Supporting Quote: A specific, detailed proposal suggests, "As a condition of taking office, they should surrender their entire stock portfolio to a government custodian in exchange for a federally-held broad market index fund," from user "xp84."
Supporting Quote: Another user agrees with restrictions: "Force them to buy nothing but SPY [an S&P 500 ETF]. If you’re in Congress, you’re allowed to get the market return. Or a government bond fund, or cash. That’s it," from user "drob518."

3. Concerns Over Term Limits and the Role of Career Bureaucrats/Lobbyists

There is a debate regarding proposed solutions like term limits. While many support them to prevent politicians from becoming entrenched, others caution that limiting terms transfers power away from elected officials and toward unelected permanent staff, lobbyists, or career bureaucrats, arguing this exchange might be worse.

Supporting Quote: A user expressing concern over term limits argues, "If you don't limit the ability of a politician to gain mindshare simply by doing a good job in congress (because you only give them two terms) all you have done is make it easier for rich people to control who can get elected," from user "mrguyorama."
Supporting Quote: Conversely, regarding careerism, one user suggests, "I don't want people in congress as a career. Do it for at most 2 terms and get back to the real world," from user "bluGill."

🚀 Project Ideas

Real-Time Political Insider Trade Tracker (R-PIT Tracker)

Summary

A service that scrapes, normalizes, validates, and alerts users in near real-time on mandatory stock transaction disclosures filed by members of Congress and their immediate families.
Addresses the frustration that current filings are delayed, often past regulatory deadlines, rendering the information useless for timely market insight.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Individual active traders, compliance officers, financial journalists, and political accountability researchers.
Core Feature	Instantaneous web/API webhook alerts upon SEC filing acknowledgment, cross-referencing trades against known affiliated entities (family members/spouses listed in disclosures).
Tech Stack	Python (Scrapy/BeautifulSoup for scraping), AWS Lambda/API Gateway for serverless processing, PostgreSQL for historical data, and a notification service (e.g., Pub/Sub or dedicated WebSocket server for real-time alerts).
Difficulty	Medium
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

"They have to fill out a disclosure form, but it's on a 30 day delay, often more because they file late." (showerst). This product directly invalidates the "too late" problem (threatofrain).
This directly addresses the core desire for transparency and the ability to monitor potential corruption or insider knowledge exploitation.

Congressional Portfolio Mandate Service (CPMS)

Summary

A user-facing tool/service that facilitates the transition of elected officials' non-exempt assets into government-approved, passively managed index funds or fully blind trusts at the start of their term.
Provides standardized, audited mandate documents suitable for immediate implementation, reducing the administrative burden ("it's a really hard problem" - bluGill) while maximizing compliance.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Congressional candidates, transition teams, government ethics offices, and their constituent support base.
Core Feature	Automated generation of IRS-compliant trust/divestment paperwork linked to publicly available, pre-vetted index fund portfolios (similar to TSP or broad market tracking).
Tech Stack	TypeScript/React for a clean web interface, integration with legal document generation libraries (e.g., DocuSign API or template generators), and integration proof-of-concept with a brokerage API for settlement verification simulation.
Difficulty	High
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Proposes a concrete solution for the "blind trust" debate. As one user noted, while they should be required to use a blind trust (alistairSH), "it still doesn't solve the problem of blind trusts not being truly blind." A standardized, government-audited mandate simplifies this greatly.
Could spark debate on whether politicians should be allowed to retain any active management or if they should only be allowed to hold broad index funds (falcor84, drob518).

Corruption Risk Scoring & Behavioral Anomaly Detection (CR-BAD)

Summary

A data analytics service that assigns a corruption risk score to every member of Congress based on behavioral patterns, aiming to flag activity that indicates leveraging office for private gain beyond simple stock trades.
Solves the problem that corruption is often nuanced and hard to prove (somenameforme), by focusing on correlated anomalies.

Details

Key	Value
Target Audience	Investigative journalists, political watchdog groups, and academic researchers focused on political economy.
Core Feature	Aggregates stock trades, lobbying meeting disclosures, bill sponsorship concentration (e.g., sponsoring multiple bills benefiting a single sector), and committee assignments vs. portfolio concentration to generate a normalized risk metric.
Tech Stack	Python (Pandas/NumPy for complex metric calculation), Graph Database (Neo4j) to map relationships between committees, donors, and investment sectors, and a BI tool (e.g., Metabase) for visualization.
Difficulty	High
Monetization	Hobby

Notes

Directly addresses the key finding mentioned: "lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions... outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension." (burkaman). This tool attempts to isolate why that performance gap exists in financial terms.
It moves discussion beyond simple insider trading to encompass complex regulatory capture scenarios raised by users regarding committee assignments (exasperaited).