Agree or not with the premise, but it is a provocative editorial. Personally, I think it's time for some new thinking, not only in Washington, but in state governments across the land. The populace was right to throw the Republican bums out of office in such dramatic fashion in 2006 and 2008. Unfortunately, the Democratic bums have shown to be even worse, more profligate and more corrupt. It's time for them all to go. I used to not be in favor of term limits. I will generally err on the side of freedom above all else. However, the advantages for the incumbent have become so massive as to make term limits necessary. We have them for our President and for many state positions, so why not the Congress? Having spent a good chunk of my life literally inside the Beltway, I can attest to the strange terrarium it is. It's this echo chamber of justification. You find it strangely easy to justify supporting a multi-billion dollar program if it creates a need for the GSA to lease 10,000 sf of office space in your district of if someone writes you a check. Numbers become completely abstract. I can recall moving to NYC from DC and my first thought when I would work on equity or debt issues was how much work we were doing for such small amounts of money. In the private sector, a deal in eight figures can make or break a career. In government, it's a rounding error. Falling into that mindset is shockingly easy, especially once you've decided to make your career in the public sector. Ms. Noonan doesn't address a solution in her article, but she beautifully describes the problem facing all of us. Term limits are my prescription. I think the lack of imagination can best be solved by new thinking from new blood, and people who know that legislating shouldn't be a career, but a public service interlude. Here's the link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363704574503631430926354.html
I should mention also that I believe our problems can be solved. However, the prescription is very difficult, both politically and in terms of lifestyle. We need term limits. I addressed that above. Along with those term limits, we need to scrap the benefits Congresspeople receive once their out of office. They don't get their salary and benefits until they die just for serving a term. Right now, you get elected and you never have to work again if you can live on a Congressional salary. Those retirement benefits disconnect our elected officials from the day-to-day struggle that is life. We don't need to stem the benefits given to people, we need to cut them back. We need to extend the retirement age from 65 to 72. The idea that you get a 20 year vacation at the end of your life should be put to rest. The retirement age was set by Franklin Roosevelt at 65 because the average life expectancy at the time was 64. Unfunded mandates? They all need to be stricken. They're a yoke around the necks of the states. The prescription drug benefit needs to go away; we can't afford it. Public health care reform should be scrapped in favor of Taxes need to be shared by everyone. Currently 49% of Americans don't pay ANY Federal taxes. Once we hit 50%, we reach a tipping point. The majority can now tax the minority. I don't care if you enact a tax where the richest pay $100 for every penny the poorest pay. If you enact a tax, EVERYONE has to have skin in the game. Any new government program proposed needs to be deficit-neutral. If you offer a new program, you need to offer a new tax. We need a balanced-budget amendment, to be able to be violated only in case of war. We also need a 50 year payment plan of our current debt. Enact a line-item veto for the President. Outlaw all earmarks. Enact a law stating that legislation in bills must be for the same purpose. In other words, don't slip in raising the debt ceiling in a funding the troops bill. You raise the debt ceiling separately. You fund the troops separately. De-unionize all government positions. Government unions now fund political campaigns. It's the fox paying the chicken to lay eggs. A government job should never be considered lifetime employment. Stop the current budgeting process which grows departments annually by a fixed amount. Instead, allow programs to grow and shrink in different years. We need a complete audit of all government programs and their effectiveness on a bi-annual basis. Those that aren't performing either get eliminated or their management fired. Where the free market can provide a program through a true competitive bidding process, that should be preferred over the government doing it. In other words, outsource vs. insource. The Federal Government has grown too big. States need more leeway on how their citizens live. The more local the government, the more responsible it is to its citizenry. Make government as local as possible. Rant over.
It isn't a rant, it is an absolute must do if anyone wants this country to survive as it is. It reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where Kramer said something to Jerry like "Am I insane or am I so sane that I just blew your mind" I just wonder how good these morons think the government jobs will be when EVERYONE else has a government job.
I understand your thoughts for term limits, but do not agree. I believe term limits are best used via the ballot box. To my knowledge, we've had only one provable out & out fraudulently elected official at the state race or higher- and that was the 2004 race for WA State Governor. It should be left to the ballot box and power of the voter to remove someone from office. Add to that, it's hard to get someone to do high public service work for relatively low pay compared to the public sector. If those people knew their tenure was limited, most the better ones would never run. It'd be a temp job. Add to that, it lessens the threat of losing ones career so partisanship may get worse. No, for me, let the people speak thru the power of the ballot. For better or for worse.
If you simply took all private money out of politics, removed first amendment rights for corporations, and actually enforced the tax code on business...almost all of these problems would go away. The problem we face is simple, the Democrats had to become the Republicans in order to win, and now the Republicans don't like it because they can no longer win at the game they created. Now they want to change the rules, it reminds me of the teams that play a certain style and win the ring. Then along comes a team that copies them and actually does it better! This in turn causes them to call foul and seek for rule changes to fix the terribly busted system that they helped create. The problem with the United States is simple. We find the worst possible way to do something and we perfect it.
To me it is absurd to think these problems are related to one political party vs. another. It's about elite vs everyone else. They pretend to like one group of poor people (evangelicals and poor southerners for Repubs) while the other group supports another group of poor people (Secular poor, minorities for Dems) meanwhile you pass tax cut after tax cut for corporations and more empowerment for elite institutions. You create a warfare (Repub) / Welfare (Dem) state and slowly consolidate more and more power in centralized government that favors a select few. You socialize losses and privatize gains. You consolidate media and spy on the people to see if they are figuring it out. Slowly but surely you entrench an Oligarchy in place which splits the majority of the populace against one another with social issues while passing greater and greater power and money to the Oligarchy. Democrats go to the same Ivy league schools as Republicans and both get campaign contributions from the same folks. The political/financial oligarchy then support the other side when one side has lost credibility. Both sides pass the same kinds of laws while paying lip service to a few social issues and legislate morality depending on the side in power (Pretend to deal with border control and try and ban gay marriage for the right or pay lip service and try and pass health care reform and gay rights for the left). On and on it goes, meanwhile the political and donor classes get a greater and greater slice of the pie while the people are more and more impoverished. When it starts to reach a crisis you turn up the hateful social rhetoric and keep people focused on the hate rather then the real issues and increasingly obvious oligarchy. Don't believe me? Has Obama acted differently then Bush in regards to the banks? How about the wars? How about domestic surveillance? Was Bush different then Clinton in pushing through free trade agreements? How about media consolidation? They have some minor differences because you don't want to be too obvious as you continual sheer the sheep otherwise they might get angry. It's the financial, political oligarchy that is killing this country. It would be exceedingly difficult to uproot these interconnected interests. Their kids go to school together and they are all parts of the same fraternities and social clubs. Democrat vs. Republican: if you can't see past that you are fucked. Hegel once talked about the dialectical process of history. He observed that history moves when there is a Thesis against an Anti-thesis and how the two merge to a middle ground of Synthesis. He was making an observation but some very rich and powerful people realized that if you control the Thesis and the Anti-Thesis you can have a great deal of control over the final Synthesis. The DNC and RNC are just two of the many, many ways that the Political Class and the Donor Class control both parties in this country. The big difference now days is that these folks have squeezed out most honest politicians in either party by controlling primaries and media coverage. Fox and MSNBC play off each other and those that watch either for news lose. If you watch things with this lens you will see that this is the truth. It's not pretty, but we might as well be adults and see what is really going on in this country so we can do something about it. It's funny because if the past 20 years of history happened in another country Americans would see it plain as day. It's a very painful truth and most people reject it outright as too scary and hurtful after all it's our country we are talking about.
