I'm all for paying politicians well and this has nothing to do with that.

The only way to beat the market over the long terms by trading individual stocks is to either devote essentially all of your time to it or to trade on insider information. We have a strong interest in our politicians doing neither of those things.

What makes far more sense is that our politicians be forced to invest their money in broad base index funds (of stocks, bonds, commodities, or other instruments) and that trading be restricted to 4 or so trading windows a year. That still allows them to get market returns.

If we filter out the people for who market returns are not good enough...I'm okay with that? First of all, if they think that, they are probably delusional. They think can out trade Citadel and Ren Tech to get some part of the minuscule amount of alpha out there in the market? On the off chance they are not delusional, then they should probably go into finance as they'll make a greater contribution there than they will in congress. Or they want to inside trade, and we're obviously ok without that.