There is something deeply backwards about a politician who has become dramatically wealthier during 13 years in Congress lecturing me about what it means to struggle financially.
Last month, Congresswoman Ann Wagner made a statement I agree with. Defending her vote to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, she said serving in Congress “is and should be about service to our country, not about getting rich at the expense of your constituents.”
Exactly.
Public service has never been the path I chose because I thought it would make me rich.
I spent 22 years in the Army and deployed to war four times. When duty called, I always answered.
After leaving the military, I built a business focused on helping organizations better serve veterans and military families.
My financial history has not been a straight line upward: I have filed for bankruptcy twice. I owed taxes, I paid them. Those are facts, and I have never hidden from them.
The first came after September 11, when my wife lost her job with Delta and I jumped back into military service from a lucrative consulting job. The second came in 2020, when the veteran-focused business I had built collapsed during the COVID pandemic.
There is no yacht in that story. No private island. No clever financial accounting. No second home. Just a business that was over leveraged with nonprofit clients and loans for a planned expansion that was scuttled in the economic catastrophe.
There was certainly no personal wealth in the story.
There is risk. There is failure. There are mistakes. There is also the experience of trying to build something, growing it to help thousands of veterans and organizations, winning over a dozen awards over ten years, and then watching it fall apart…and then getting back up to start again.
A lot more Americans recognize themselves in that story than Washington politicians may realize.
She was already wealthy when she entered Congress in 2013. Estimates put her net worth at just over $6 million at the beginning of her first term and roughly $26 million today.
That does not, by itself, mean she did anything wrong.
Her husband had a successful private-sector career and she was an executive herself before going into politics. The Wagners invested their money. Those investments grew. Wealth itself is not the issue.
The issue is the contempt for those who aren’t wealthy. The disrespect for those not in her circle.
Wagner’s campaign has argued that my financial history should disqualify me from serving in Congress. Every statement is a swipe at my lack of millions like her.
Think about what that argument actually means.
Are Americans who have gone bankrupt disqualified from public service or villains?
Are small-business owners who failed during COVID morally suspect?
Are families who fell behind when their income disappeared incapable of serving their communities?
Or might someone who has actually experienced financial uncertainty understand something about the lives of working families that Washington too often forgets?
I am not asking voters to admire my financial struggles. Financial hardship is not a character credential, just as wealth is not a character defect. But I refuse to be ashamed of having lived through hard times.
I know what it means to succeed, and I know what it means to fail. I know what it means to serve my country when that service costs something personally. I know what it feels like to rebuild after the plans you made for your life fall apart.
I know exactly what it feels like to go to the grocery store and hesitate at the check out and wonder if we have enough in the bank to cover it and that twinge of pending humiliation as you wait to see. This is happening every single day in the United States for working people.
I know because I am out talking to them every single day from the check out ladies at a small grocery store in Gasconade County to the clerk at the Casey General Store in St. Claire. From the business owners barely making ends meet in Sullivan to the young lady working at Walmart who thanks God every day it offers health insurance she can buy into.
Those experiences have made me a better candidate, and I believe they would make me a better member of Congress.
Public service should not be reserved for people whose lives have been perfectly optimized for financial success. Congress already has plenty of millionaires.
It could use more people who understand what happens when a paycheck disappears, when a business goes under, when an injured foot means you can’t operate a back loader for six months. Someone who understands when bills keep arriving anyway and when hard work does not guarantee that everything works out.
Ann Wagner is entitled to be proud of her financial success. Her being wealthy isn’t the issue. It’s pulling the ladder up behind her and looking down at those she is supposed to serve from her ivory tower of riches as less than her and unworthy of her time and care.
After 13 years in a job she says is supposed to be about service rather than getting rich, she should think twice before treating financial struggle as a moral failing in the people she was elected to represent.
I have spent much of my life in public service. It has cost me at times.
I would choose it again because service over self is how I was raised and how I will serve myself.
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