If you’re not in house leadership, salaries are around $174,000. Depending on where someone is in their life (children in college, mortgage, etc) this may not be enough to be a single income earner in a family.
Not saying that family members should have unfettered abilities to trade, but having to use something like a trading plan or announcing trades prior or even just (gasp) enforcing insider trading laws against them, would be terrific.
Members of Congress tend to wind up having to run two households, though, and I'm sure there's a variety of other sorts of expenses that are fairly unusual. Salaries haven't gone up in over a decade, either.
Limiting Congress to people who can independently afford the income/expense hit might not be optimal.
> salaries havent gone up because they've opted to decline the increase for themselves
Well, sure; why would the wealthy incumbents want to make it easier for new, not-independently-wealthy candidates to break in? You probably limit the AOC-style folks a bit by not adjusting for inflation.
> they can easily pass a bill to fund lodgings for congress critters in DC if they wanted
Not saying that family members should have unfettered abilities to trade, but having to use something like a trading plan or announcing trades prior or even just (gasp) enforcing insider trading laws against them, would be terrific.