I have a little bit of a spicy story for you: hey, i'm matt, i'm an astronaut and i'm also a person who realizes that congress should not be able to trade their own stocks, because it's pretty much freaking ludicrous, but, alas, the u.s political system and congress, Especially never ceases to amaze congress struggles to ban lawmakers trading amid very tough negotiations. Now, unfortunately, i'm not invited to these negotiations because i'm busy at the nasa studio to bring you this particular video, but i imagine it goes hey. That's pretty immoral that we're doing this and then they're like yeah, but we're making a lot of money and we're also greedy. So we don't really want to stop now, like i said, that's just what i imagined the negotiations to be.

I wasn't there myself, but i assume it's something along those lines. Earlier this year a ban on lawmaker, trades seemed inevitable, but months have now passed and in spite of a wide swath of lawmakers across the political spectrum expressing support the parties have yet to come together. On the details, to put that another way, a lot of voters, a lot of constituents were saying: hey, that's pretty up and like oh yeah yeah, it is we're going to fix it and then they're like please forget about it. Please forget about it.

I hope they really forget about it. Close observers now say that the last best hope for action this year is from ongoing talks. Among about a dozen senators consensus is building around certain issues, but he doesn't feel like we're anywhere close to being able to say. We've got it all wrapped up and for a politician to say that jeff merkley uh out of oregon, it means they're, probably nowhere closer to actually solving it.

Oh boy, he added with a laugh when press on what the clock might run out for action during this election year. It's bs, i know pelosi is the face of it. It is many politicians. Many many politicians, like i said, she's the symbolic face.

So she gets a lot of the hate for it and she should get hate. I just think there are many other politicians who should also it's just this simple. They are privy to information that the rest of the public, isn't. Why should they be able to trade? On it and i've alluded to this before, but i want to throw out one thing that i think is very very important: don't let them stop at this whole concept of well we're just not going to trade, individual stocks.

That's the thing - and i think it's one of these weird things where they're betting on a lot of the public, really, it seems like they think we're too stupid to understand what they're doing but they're saying hey, no more individual stocks, don't let them get away with That they could still trade etfs, they could still trade options. They can still abuse their position, which remember, i'm not too up to date on verbatim remembering their oath, but i'm pretty sure they're there to serve the community, not lying their own goddamn pockets. Now, for those of you who are a little bit more into politics and you're like okay, like what's like the particular thing, that's allegedly holding it up right now, besides the fact that they're greedy, it's this, how to deal with lawmakers incoming assets, gillibrand suggests a model. Would be along the lines of we would allow people to own what they own, but they would have to put it behind a blind trust.

But the very sides seem far from agreement on a range of related issues like whether lawmakers would be able to dissolve their assets tax-free if they wanted and how blind trust would work for people below certain asset levels. So they are getting into the minutia of it. And surprise, surprise: that's how laws are made, but the fact that we even got into this situation is what i would argue is the upsetting thing. The fact that at some point lawmakers looked at each other and they're like yeah, no, we should be able to trade on all the information that we have.

That's the mess-up part, and now we're really deep in a hole, and that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to dig out of it, but it's just so so insane that in 2022 this is something that's being discussed as if it's not so abhorrently bad. Obviously those are my own opinions from one astronaut to another. Obviously let me know your thoughts, because this is just ludicrous, but who knows, maybe i'm just being a little bit too pessimistic on the whole political regime and gridlock. We currently have going on.