The New House Speaker Has No Bank Account, Achieving Both Views And Finances From The 1800s

// The new speaker of the House gives off major Bible salesman vibes. You are not physically threatened by such a person, but their very existence throws your whole conception of the world off momentarily, because a lot of things necessarily pop into your head:

• There are still door-to-door Bible salesmen in 2023?
• Why have I never heard of a Bible saleswoman?
• I have already read the Bible and already own a copy, and if I hadn’t or didn’t and for some reason wanted to I could just take one of the free ones from the Gideons in one of the dozens of hotel rooms I visit every year.
• Also, the full text of the Bible is available for free online from multiple websites, that has to hurt business.
• Does this person want to asphyxiate me and wear my skin?

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Yes, right down to his name that is so generic you will forget it by the next paragraph, Mike Johnson truly is the nongendered Bible salesperson archetype of Congressional leaders.

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He doesn’t shy away from it, either, other than the nongendered part, because he is very clear that he is a MAN, and women are WOMEN, and there is no other option or spectrum of possible characteristics spanning between the two, thank you very much (this, of course, being what all men who are very comfortable with their masculinity say). It’s OK, though, he is simply expressing his religion, and Johnson has been so busy shitting all over the separation of church and state (you know, one of the founding tenets of our nation that’s the very first part of the very first right in the Bill of Rights) that you could almost forget that he at least seems to believe that two of every species of dinosaur marched onto Noah’s Ark.

Really it’s not fair of me to call all of this stuff 1800s viewpoints though because many smart people at the start of the 19th century already would have been unnerved by it, and they didn’t even know about dinosaurs yet.

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Now this totally relatable guy, whose smarmy little smirk doesn’t at all make you want to instinctively knee him in the testicles, is speaker of the House. In addition to his viewpoints, his finances have gotten a second look. Those are no less troubling, albeit for vastly different reasons.

The man does not have a bank account. Or, indeed, any financial assets of any kind, at least not that he’s disclosed on his most recent mandatory personal financial disclosures, according to The Daily Beast, the first to report on the sad state of Johnson’s financial affairs.

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Going back to 2016, when he first began compulsory reporting, Johnson has never declared a bank account. He does not have to disclose accounts with a balance of less than $1,000 as long as the combined value of all accounts (including those of his wife and children) does not exceed $5,000.

Still, Johnson reported over $200,000 in personal income last year, and his wife additionally received her own salary from two different employers. One week’s worth of Johnson’s pay alone, if deposited into a bank account, would easily put Johnson above the $1,000 reporting threshold. Even taking only his $174,000 salary as a member of the U.S. House (Johnson will be getting a big raise as speaker), which is on a monthly payroll schedule, every paycheck would dump $14,500 (pretax) into some account somewhere.

I like to think that Johnson is taking his salary in big bags of coins or gold dust or something, More likely, given that he did disclose several liabilities which would probably require a bank account to service, he is living paycheck to paycheck and doesn’t consider a bank account that is routinely drained to be worth reporting even if it regularly receives five-figure infusions. (Johnson himself has thus far declined to comment on stories about his finances.)

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Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that doesn’t make them bad people. Financial struggles should not necessarily disqualify a person from holding public office. Yet, when someone who publicly claims to be extremely fiscally conservative cannot manage to save a dime by age 51 on a household income well above $200,000, it certainly calls into question whether that person ought to be given any power whatsoever over the $6.3 trillion federal budget as the next in line for the presidency after the vice president.

Then again, we’re talking about the same person who’s apparently convinced himself that a pair of tyrannosaurs wandered off an ark too small to hold them just a few thousand years ago and then managed not to eat either of the sheep or goats or horses as they too disembarked. Why, I guess, would Mike Johnson save anything for retirement when Jesus might show up to rapture him at any moment?

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

ATL Finance, Finance Docket, Financial Disclosures, Government, Jonathan Wolf, Mike Johnson