Congressional lawmakers are best known as spenders, allocating trillions of dollars for both guns and butter, but they also are investors with an affinity for technology blue chips.
Three of the four most popular investments of the members of the House and Senate in 2007 were Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Intel, according to the OpenSecrets.org web site of the Center for Responsive Politics.
Though 88 lawmakers, or 16.4 percent of the total, had No. 1 General Electric in their portfolios, Cisco, Microsoft, and Intel followed on its heels at 12.7 percent, 11.4 percent, and 10.7 percent.
Also making the top 50 were No. 16 IBM (7.7 percent), No. 20 Hewlett-Packard (6.5 percent), No. 24 Nokia (5.6 percent), and No. 31 Apple (4.7 percent).
Oracle, Motorola, and Dell tied for No. 34, while EMC deadlocked at No. 43 with Washington Mutual and two pharmaceutical companies.
In dollar terms, the top congressional technology investment was No. 11 Apple, with an aggregate value of $6.4 million to $31 million, followed by Cisco, with a range of $5.8 million to $27.2 million.
In disclosing their investments, lawmakers don’t have to provide a specific dollar amount. Instead they provide a range of the investment’s value.
The reports of 14 lawmakers had not yet been included in the database either because they had not been filed or because they had not been entered, standardized, and coded.