Citizen-Funded Elections vs. Term Limits
Okay, so there’s a lot of debate on how to make congress useful. I mostly here people arguing in favor of citizen-funded elections (that is, public donations only with small caps) and term limits for people in office.
The Problem w/ Term Limits
- The undue influence of special interests does not go away with term limits. Within the # of terms a candidate has available, they will still be subject to fundraising and therefore ineffective at their job if they desire to remain in the job.
- The undue influence of special interests will not go away entirely at the end of the term, because under-principled people nearing the end of their term limit will have a strong incentive to designate a successor and fund-raise for that person. Meaning that you haven’t actually solved the problem of wasted time, corruption, etc. You’ve just freshened up the targets a bit.
- Forced term limits does not provide an opportunity for a legitimately talented and useful individual to serve for a while. This is risky, so it’s a less important point than the above ones, but if you postulate that the current system would turn over more if less special money was involved anyway, it might be actually more less of a risk than it is now. But see above for the real problems.
Citizen-Funded Elections to the Rescue
The whole point here is to return our representatives to acting on behalf of the citizenry. There are a few benefits postulated to result from this:
- More legislation - part of the reason congress is often the bottleneck is because they spend like 1/3-2/3 of their time in office raising money. Imagine how much work you’d get done if you spent, say, half of your time panhandling (assuming that’s not currently your job). Less? Yeah. It’d be easier to get important reforms through if people weren’t having dinners with SIGs while they are on payroll “working on your behalf.”
- Better legislation - the time currently spent fundraising could instead be spent 1) reading the legislation, 2) thinking about the impact of the legislation and 3) conducting impact studies and trials. All of which, I think you’ll agree, works better than repeatedly arguing talking points provided by SIGs as a substitute for actual effort.
Both?
Yeah, that’d be fine, probably. Compromise for the sake of progress is awesome. Hence the problem we have today. Everyone’s stuck in this point-counterpoint situation in which [ed: sarcasm alert] no combination of both side’s ideas could ever possibly be a better solution than just a pure implementation on one side.
