Yes and in fact, banning individual stock trades would likely force anyone who already owns individual stocks that have appreciated and wants to run for office to sell them and pay a large capital gains tax bill. That disincentivizes anyone who is financially successful from running for office, unless long ago they decided to only invest in mutual funds.

It seems as this article indicates, the 2012 stock sale reporting requirement has made it hard for members of Congress to trade on insider knowledge. However, the public perception hasn't caught up, leaving to demands for more restrictions.

I feel like we see this in all sorts of disciplines with law – e.g. the massive pile of minimum wage, idle time protection, tipping protection, etc. that NYC now has for delivery drivers.

People don't seem to realize (other than Regulatory Response Fees), the extent to which the city _has_ addressed a lot of the issues with being a delivery driver [1].

A lot of folks therefore still make a bunch of outdated arguments and advocate for things that already exist, or try to _forcibly_ find/portray that things _must_ still be broken, because they argue as if the inputs follow from the conclusion they believe must inevitably always be true (e.g. believing that people 'must' be being screwed over).

Probably also very simply downstream from 'once you've developed an organization to argue for a cause, the cause can't cleanly retire itself'.

[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/news/073-26/report-finds-nyc-de... (lede: workers’ average hourly earnings, including tips, increased from $10.48 in Q3 2023 to $27.03 in Q2 2026).

In the US, retroactive criminal legislation is largely banned by the Constitution, so it's unlikely existing traders would have to do anything, much less sell all their stock. I could see the law saying all current and future officials must move their investments (and those of immediate family) to a blind trust, but that shouldn't have any tax implications.