- You’re probably right about the debt thing, the guy just got the official number wrong…but it’s also not like he was necessarily misinforming anyone…at least not on the high end. 16T is just the on books stuff. If you include the debt of Fannie and Freddie, which the Federal Government has taken ownership of, that’s another $6-7 Trillion right there. Then you can consider the unfunded liabilities, which range up to $200 Trillion depending on which estimate you use. That’s $200 Trillion. World GDP is about $60 Trillion.
Then there’s contingent liabilities that aren’t accounted for either. The official debt is nothing if you even just begin to include the off-budget items that the government just simply doesn’t include in the books…for no other reason than to make the debt number smaller. Seriously if any other organization tried to file their books the way the government does, they’d be in jail.
So, if anything, even with $17 Trillion, this guy was severely low-balling it, to a point at which people have no idea how bad it really is. But I do see your point about being accurate. Either use the official number that people are familiar with, or explain what’s really going on and use the real numbers. As I said, he probably has no idea about off-the-books items and just got the official number wrong.
- I’d be interested to see Hoppe’s writings on term limits. I’m not fully convinced it’s such a bad idea, provided the limit is low enough. I’d need to think more about how that might play out. Sure you get a higher time preference, but is the supposed low time preference really helping? It’s not as if Congressmen are currently making decisions based on long-term health…they’re still only focused on the next election. At this point in my thinking, it would seem that being able to be re-elected every term would actually entice even more of the high time preference behavior…as you actually have something to gain by pleasing big donors and big voting blocks of special interests…before the next election.
If you cannot be re-elected, it would seem you have less incentive to do this, as these donors and special interest groups have less to offer you. Of course one could make the argument that people will simply run in their initial campaign with the sole purpose of favoring a specific group, and some agreement may be made beforehand to arrange some kind of back-pay…but even then it would be hard to make the case that this situation would be any worse than the current one.
It seems to me it would be either better, or at worst, the same as it is currently.
The Constitution dictates a 2 year term for Representatives and 6 years for Senators. Even limiting terms to a one-time thing would not seem to be able to do much when the term in question lasts the better part of a decade. They get elected and have plenty of time to help out their cronies, and people are pretty much stuck with them unless they do something outlandishly bad enough to get literally millions of people interested enough in politics outside of political season to force a recall of some kind…an unlikely scenario. Even by the time normal election time rolls around again, the name recognition and all the other benefits of being an incumbent make it incredibly difficult for any challenger, no matter how bad the incumbent might have been. General public memory is about 2 years at the most.
I suppose if we’ll be amending the Constitution to institute term limits anyway, we could change those term lengths as well.
My proposal would most likely be considered too harsh by most, but I think it would be the only way a term limit strategy would result in any noticeable improvement. I’d be thinking a one-term limit, with 2 year term lengths…for both Houses. Abolish re-election. We certainly have enough people in the country to facilitate this now. In the early days, Madison spoke of mathematically growing the size of the House of Representatives in relation to the overall population, to make sure the number of people represented by each member of the House didn’t grow too large. Obviously this didn’t get included in the Constitution. So we’re now looking at Representatives “representing” an average of close to 1 million people each. One single person…“represents” one million people.
If we’re going to take the hit on that end (i.e. extremely high citizen to representative ratio), we may as well get to use the benefit of the other…constant rotation. No such thing as a “politician”. At least not on a national level. Everyone is basically forced to be a statesman (at least in the career sense.) No way to make a career out of being a Congressman.
At this point in my thinking I’m inclined to believe this would be an improvement for a number of reasons. For one thing it would force more people (or should I say, force the allowance of more people) into the actual house of law-making. Over time (a relatively short time, actually), being a “Congressman” would lose a lot of it’s luster and star-power. Sure they’d still be getting interviews on the news, but only during those two years. Soon, so many people will have been a “Congressman” that it will be considered less and less of an honor to be revered…or even achievement to be widely celebrated. People won’t be star-struck, and hanging on every word, and getting all excited when they happen to see a Congressman! It’ll get to a point where probably at least a majority of the population actually personally knows someone who has been a Congressman.
And all those guys who’ve gone and served their time in Washington will have first-hand experience of just how ridiculous the whole thing is. They’ll come back home and understand what really goes on there…and they won’t be so impressed nor intimidated by politics or politicians any more. And given enough time, neither will the general public. All these Congressmen will talk to their friends and neighbors, or their friends and neighbors will talk to them…and the entire perception of government officials (and government itself) will change.
As for what will happen with the actual Congressmen while they’re in Congress, they’ll only have two years, and they won’t have any future campaign to be planning and running. There won’t be time (or at least not much) for them to be cozied up to by the special interests (especially the corporate ones)…and there won’t be much the special interests can offer them anyway. And in turn, there won’t be much the Congressmen can offer the special interests…again, they only have 2 years…2 simple sessions…one single term. For the special interests, that’s not a lot of time to schmooze enough politicians into your pocket to get your monopoly legislation passed. And by the same token, it’s not much time for a bought and paid-for Congressman to get enough colleagues on his side for his crony deal. And the risk is pretty great for the special interests…if the legislation doesn’t go through, all their effort is completely sunk. None of the lawmakers they spent all that time and money on getting to their side will be there come next Congress. Not a single one. They’ll all be gone…and they’re never coming back.
I think this would put a severe damper on the lobby racket.
And by the same token, it would also possibly make it more difficult to get new bills passed, which would obviously be a good thing.
As more and more people got rotated in and out, it would become more and more obvious just how unnecessary the government is. For one thing, people would more plainly seen how the government really doesn’t do much to help anything. They would either know someone who’s been in Congress, or have actually been there themselves…and understand there’s really no such mystique that everyone seems to think exists. For another, people would start to recognize how things are still getting done throughout the economy, despite so little being done in Congress.
Government would become less and less relevant. The elected officials would become less and less revered, and considered less and less important. The things Congress could or would “get done” would shrink to fewer and fewer. Before long, people would start running for Congress just to decrease their taxes, or whatever burden was annoying them most lately. (And they’d end up getting elected too.) The great part about that though would be that they wouldn’t see a benefit in helping a special interest…they’d be much more interested in the regular civilian…because they’re aware they’d return to being one themself in just a couple short years…with no special priviledges, no adoring public, and no back-scratching lobbiests and special interest groups. They’d be in Congress thinking about the average everyday guy…if for no other reason than because that’s what they’ll be again soon enough.
Now that I think about it, ironically, a one-term limit might be the best way to get Congressional behavior that is more focused on the average citizen, and the long term.
The more I think about this, the better I like it.