Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Term limits, of course, are a huge incentive to profiteer off your office: if you're only going to be there a limited time, better get all you can as fast as you can. From the highest bidders, of course.

 

I'm not sure term limits discourage graft. I think it's possible they encourage it instead, because you can't be a career politician so there's more reason to get what you can while you can.

I also think that being a competent legislator is hard. You need to have A LOT of domain knowledge. Like, you need to know about everything from tax policy to agricultural policy, military policy, housing policy, land use policy, and like a million other things. There's a LOT you need to know about. And it takes time to learn all that. I think that if you have term limits you're going to have even more incompetent legislators, simply because no one will have the domain knowledge necessary to know what the hell they're doing.

As far as democracy vs representative republic - I mean, c'mon, we're talking about term limits. Clearly I know we're not talking about direct democracy, because, again, we're @#$@ing talking about term limits. You might think you're making a meaningful distinction relevant to the discussion, but you're not.

 

And, again, if the will of the people is to keep the same people in office through fair elections, I don't really see an issue with that.

 

Well, those local government economists... they tend to be on the cutting edge on economic prognostication. My local government spent 20 minutes talking about chicken shit from urban chicken farmers at the last commission meeting. Guess we should prepare for the poultry tsunami of 2017.

 

But don't you prevent people from staying forever like Turkey Neck McConnell and amassing enough influence to be worth bribing?

 

Unlike the feds, local governments don't have the luxury of printing money to cover for their fuck-ups.

If you live in even a mid-size locality and its leaders aren't paying close attention to what's going on with the national economy, they should be fired immediately.

 

Agreed. Most do and the vast majority plan for worse-case scenario. Doesn't mean that scenario is likely or even more than likely. To say the economy is going to shit because Randy Johnson, the local CPA with a community college degree, says it might is ludicrous.

 

LOL

 

I mean, a US senator is always worth bribing. They're 1 of 100 people setting US law. That's pretty powerful. And SOMEONE has to be in a leadership position even if it's only for 8 years or whatever.

 

Well of course nobody has suggested that. I merely challenged the suggestion that our $19 trillion in debt is having no impact on the economy.

 

Great logical reasoning at the end.

 

If you term-limit the politicians, soon only our corporate overlords will know how anything runs. They'll completely control the show.