Actually, there are more like 244,000 in the group Buffet is talking about if I read it right. And he is not talking about millionaires. He is talking about people that make more than $1 million each year. There is a huge difference.
I'm not a huge fan of term limits. I don't think they solve the problems people think they will. The professional politicians just change jobs, Representative, Senator, Governor, or get appointed to a political position until they are eligible to run again. And I like the idea of institutional memory. The issues are complicated. Actions have consequences. You get idealistic rookies showing up that are going to change the world so they want to do certain things. The members that have been there and went through it already know better what those consequences are. Why do you think so many people change when they get to Washington? They get an education about what the consequences of some of those actions are. They realize many of those idealistic rookie naive positions will hurt the country a lot more than help it. Most of them are reasonably intelligent and most do really care about the country. If they get hit over the head long enough and hard enough with cold hard facts, most of them start to pay attention.
So why don't they explain this to their constituents? We won't let them. It's complicated, so most of us get bored and won't listen. And by trying to explain cold hard facts, their political opponents can pick out sound bites, take them out of context, put cute jingles with them, and destroy them politically. They commit political suicide if they try to be honest with the electorate. So we get campaign promises that they know they will not be able to follow up on. And, to me much worse, because they cannot honestly discuss the issues and consequences without committing political suicide, we cannot get an honest debate on an issue. If they don't politically posture, they have no chance of getting elected.
Besides, politics is a craft. When rookies show up in Washington, they don't accomplish much until they learn what is going on. That can take a term or two. It takes skill and knowledge to get a bill through congress. You get that through experience. No, I am not a fan of term limits for my Representatives and Senators. I'm all for it with yours though. Besides, the President is term limited. Has that helped?
If someone shows up in Washington standing so firm on principle that they will get a hernia if they burp, they are irrelevant. Unless they get everything they want, they are a "no" vote. Nobody is going to get everything they want in a complicated controversial bill that requires 60 Senators and 218 (I think that number is right) Representatives to vote for it and a President to sign it. There is no reason to even listen to them or talk to them. The way a complicated controversial bill gets passed is that enough people get enough of what they want so that they can stomach accepting some of what they don't want. That way, instead of the extremes winning, we get a balanced approach. I think a big part of the problems we are facing is that we have too many people scared to death of burping.
So why are we in the position we are in? It's complicated and it involves the rest of the world. We are not going to be able to solve it alone. And the politicians we have been electing have not had to face the consequences of their actions. We have been a great robust economy. We have been growing so money has never been a problem. But some things have been going on lately that have changed that. We are aging. We are getting to where we have a greater percentage retiring than paying into the systems that support those retirees. It's not the politicians we have elected that have really caused the problems with pension plans, Social Security, Medicare and all that. It is pure demographics. The politicians have been doing what we wanted them to do. Spend money on us. That's why we kept reelecting them.
The rest of the world has changed. With the developing world, we now have competition for the natural resources, especially energy, so the cost of doing business has gone up for us. We also have competition in supplying the world market.
Our demographics have changed and the business model we thrived in has changed. We need to change the way we are doing things. And with us, the voters, not allowing our leaders to have an honest discussion of what the real problems are, I'm really concerned we are not going to find a good answer. These are complicated issues. Rookies with no experience are not going to be able to solve them.
So back to IHWIMY's original topic, sort of. I consider taxing the super-rich more a logical step, but like term limits, I think it is more of a distraction that a real solution. And I really dont think term limits is a logic step.
