Term limits remove good politicians as much as they remove bad ones. Plus, as many have pointed out before, you need experienced leadership. If everyone, by definition, has less than eight years of experience in their role it'd be even more chaotic than it already is.
The problem is not that politicians can get elected for decades, the problem is that incumbents have an unfair advantage. Fix that problem and term limits become a non-factor.
Plus, to look at how ineffective rules like that are, Putin is president of Russia again despite their being term limits intended to prevent that.
The Russian constitution explicitly allows a return to power after a term away like what Putin managed. So not exactly sure how that last statement of yours is an argument (pro or contra).
In Germany, on the other hand, the Chancellor is not elected via a direct people vote, its terms are not limited. And just because of the segmentation of the partisan landscape Merkel could stay in power much longer than its party has even a third of the people votes.
While not criticizing Merkel here for anything I just want to point out that a definition of a democracy must be a very flexible one to accommodate this constellation.
Since absence of term limits is not quite working (we get career politicians) and challengers are at a disadvantage compared to incumbents, I think it's worth trying term limits. It gets us a bit closer to "demo + cracy".
If we can get new non-entrenched people in power maybe we'd see better governance --otherwise why not create a ruling class, if career politicians execute better? Note, I would not advocate for a ruling class but people seem to be saying people who know governance and politics govern better (presuming experience means they can get things done for their constituency).
You don't just try random shit at the national level and see how it works out. If you really think this is a great idea, try it at the state level, see how it plays out over decades and then get back to us.
I agree that non-entrenched people are better for governance, but let's pin the blame on the real problem here: Corporate sponsorship of politicians. They do not care if they have to sponsor some new politician every eight years. It might even save them some money since these perennially new politicians would have less clout. It costs a lot more to buy a House Majority leader who's got 30 years of experience than Rep. Nobody who's a first-timer.
You need to think these things through to their inevitable conclusion.
One way you might even the playing field for opponents is to pay back a portion of the campaign costs on a per-vote received basis but only to non-incumbent candidates. It seems absurd to have to use public money to foster democracy, but there are far worse things to spend it on.
Any ideas on how to de-corporatize the system? I don't think term limits help, in fact they make it worse.
Any contributions go to a common pot allotted by a caucus vote system. I don't think a crackpot going up for election should get the same (monetary/election) support as people who actually have tenable platforms, so I would not advocate for equal redistribution.
One person's crackpot is another's advocate. The amount of money going to fringe candidates would be minimal at best, while those that are serious contenders would get a well-deserved bit of assistance.
You can fine-tune this a bit, like have minimum vote requirements (e.g. 5% of the votes) in order to be part of the program, but the basic idea helps frame things better.
If you look at how most elections go, the extreme fringe candidates get at most hundreds of votes, it's inconsequential in the scheme of things.
This was roughly how it worked at the federal level in Canada until the Conservative party cancelled it in 2015. If you got at least 2% of the vote you got a "per-vote subsidy" of $1.75 per vote.
The reason the Conservative party killed the program was because it hurt the other parties more than it hurt them. As they were always better at raising money, anything that cut funding to the other parties was seen as a big win for them: Like the Republicans they are very self-interested.
There are multiple parties active in the Canadian system, some only getting 5-10% of the votes, which means they're at even more of a disadvantage than before.
"Initiatives are also responsible for another feature that makes the Assembly unworkable: term limits. These may sometimes be desirable but in California they are simply too short. Proposition 140 set them at six years for Assembly members, eight for state senators.
"As a result, representatives do not have a good grasp of the details of bills, have little long-term loyalty to the institution they serve and can sometimes be unduly influenced by more experienced lobbyists. No sooner do people become head of the assembly, or of an important committee, than they are term-limited out. Legislative leadership becomes almost impossible."
Much of the experience comes from teams of people who can move on to work for others. I'd be interested to see examples of important progress made by people who had been in power for decades which could not have been reasonably achieved by people with less time in office.
A first term senator is often viewed as highly inexperienced, and they get six years to get their shit together.
If congress was limited to eight years like the president they'd barely be getting the hang of it when you turf them out.
What about term limits for CEOs? Mayors? Football players?
It's absurd. Remove barriers to competition and keep the best by having a robust, democratic process to weed out those who are bad.
A badly thought out term limit implementation would see people flip from the house to the senate and back again, perhaps working in tandem to fend off any competition. What point does that useless exercise serve?
Congress should have never put term limits on the President, a response to the immense popularity of FDR and their conflicts with him. It was not an action that served the interests or will of the American people.
It's also hilarious that people have even an inkling of hope that a majority of Congress would impose limits on their own power such as the type that is being discussed.
Would you vote in favor of removing yourself from your position?
Even if YOU would, do you think a majority of your coworkers would?
I'm pretty sure term limits are counterproductive. They have the effect of booting out good servants and replacing their institutional knowledge with the institutional knowledge of lobbyists and party operations (that pick the new candidates).
I mean, that is generally why someone gets reelected, because they are popular with the people that vote for them. Representatives that don't serve their constituents aren't all that successful at getting reelected.
So in my world view, term limits hand more power to parties. Bad.
I would venture to guess you've never lived in NY State. Between Sheldon Silver & Joseph Bruno you had two corrupt individuals controlling the state legislature for almost 20 years.
If term limits are good enough for the President, they're good enough for Congress.
> If term limits are good enough for the President, they're good enough for Congress.
Term limits were added for the President because Congress got grumpy that FDR kept winning. It was pure partisan politics. Without them, we might've wound up with a third Obama term instead of Trump.
He also tried to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s.
He had an inordinate amount of power that we are very lucky he used mostly benignly. The two term only precedent was a defacto rule that only became written because it was broken.
It was enacted at the height of FDR's popularity, too.
FDR was exceptional but a large part of why he was reelected was because of ongoing events. In any other situation he would not have. The American people after his death wisely decided it wasn't good for someone to have power for 13+ years. That turns the office into something imperial. Packing the court was an abuse of power that he was only able to attempt because he was popular, and popularity isn't always the best way to pick leaders.
Other incredible presidents didn't get three terms (Roosevelt comes to find). Obama has at best been a good president. Does he really deserve 12 years? Is he more deserving of that than all other presidents but FDR? Historically, no. And without the rule, he'd get it by default as he's obviously better than Trump and incumbent advantage and all that.
Without term limits we're just waiting for the bizarro Nixon in Watchmen to show up...and given time it would happen. Maybe Trump would be it.
> He also tried to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s.
In his second term. So, hardly a dangerous protection re against by term limits.
> He had an inordinate amount of power
As the failure of the court packing scheme demonstrates, he didn't have an "inordinate amount of power" personally, he was just, on other issues, successful at convincing others with power that his preferred approaches were desirable.
I live in Michigan which has term limits for legislators. I don't think they have done any good for the state. They tend to hand more power to the executive and parties, neither of which is a particularly good thing.
I do think that there should be term limits for high executive positions though. They are different than legislative positions, as they involve a good deal more individual power.
The problem is not that you can elect those two individuals repeatedly, it's that their constituents either like them enough to re-elect, or their challengers have some sort of disadvantage when running.
The type of gerrymandering that divides districts along partisan lines is even more pernicious with term limits, it directly hands control of the district to the party.
The type of gerrymandering that shaves partisan districts to create a contested district is also bad under term limits, a great representative can be shoved aside by the term limit and replaced by some party operator.
I was at a dinner once, where the couple sitting next to me was from Sacramento. The woman (a nice, elderly lady of around 60) worked for a lobbyist in Sacramento as his secretary/"typist". She described how the committee (of representatives) kept changing while her boss stayed the same; as a result, one of the first things an incoming committee chair did was to ask her boss to help him out with the maze of rules and regulations. Oh, and often the committee chair would have her come over for meetings to take notes (as apparently they didn't have any position in the budget), which she dutifully shared with her boss.
I used to be pro term limits, but my conversation with her was very eye opening.
I recall that in one of my first lectures in my 'public administration' course the teacher explained how a number of high level public servants, practically speaking, have a lot of power, perhaps more even than the politicians they work for, because they hold the institutional knowledge and have the ear of the politicians who (generally) trust their expertise, across administrations.
It was something I'd never thought about before and it also made me think about term limits and how things are not as simple as they seem.
The British TV series, "Yes Minister" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister) and "Yes Prime Minister" was a satirical series based around exactly that premise - a clueless politician who felt he was making all the decisions, and the actual power-behind-the-scenes bureaucrat who did. Although aging, it is still scarily accurate, if not more so.
> - Propose a constitutional amendment that imposes term limits on all members of Congress.
Term limits for elected officials just shift the balance of knowledge and experience to lobbyists. Not something to get behind. (Reforming the electoral system so that there is meaningful, non-binary choice, deals with the negative aspects of incumbency without the problems term limits has. But term limits are a favorite proposal because they benefit the already powerful lobbies.)
> A five-year ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.
So the pool of people willing to take such positions is limited to those who can't get a secure job relating to public policy so that the ban from work that isn't dependent on the term of office of an elected official doesn't actually lose them anything. Again, another thing that tips the balance of knowledge and skill in favor of lobbies and out of the public sector.
They are the kind of reforms that sound good if you haven't thought the effects through.
But of course none of those things are going to happen, because Congress doesn't want them and the President doesn't pass laws. Congress also doesn't want a moratorium on federal hires, tariffs to shore up American manufacturers, etc. That's the thing about populist demagogues: they may tick all the hot button issues for an angry and dissatisfied demographic, but they can't really get anything done because they have no governing coalition. This is especially true when the election results in no real mandate in terms of majority support. The last thing I would mention, and it's important to understand when looking at the U.S. political system, is that we all claim to be unhappy with government, and especially Congress, and we're all big supporters of ideas like term limits, except when it comes to our own representative, who we send back pretty much year after year as long as the pork continues to flow our way. The problem, in short, is not the "elites" in Washington; it's us.
Trump literally CANNOT make Congress do anything. It's up to them to limit their power. And it's not like Trump has a popular mandate to use to his advantage. Mitch McConnell himself said infrastructure and term limits were absolutely not a priority of this congress. This is completely out of Trump's little hands.
But go ahead, keep living in your made up dream world where Trump can wave his scepter and make all those nice little promises he made come true.
I think it's much easier to get elected than to move the whole government in the directions you've promised to move it during the campaign. This has been demonstrated over and over again. Power is quite distributed in the U.S. political system and the presidency is pretty ephemeral when viewed from the perspective of congresspeople who in some cases have held office for decades. The president has a good deal of executive power, but his or her political power emanates from the skilled use of the bully pulpit. One of the few populists who was successfully able to battle his own party's interests was Teddy Roosevelt when he went after the big trusts. Perhaps Trump will be as successful, but one thing Roosevelt had going for him was his skills as a politician. It remains to be seen whether Trump has these skills.
Terms limits are magic. I first heard Ken Langone talk about it so vehemently and the more I looked into it the more I realized that it would be a good thing. Having a larger pool of public officials to choose from over time allows for experimentation to see what(read who) works and what doesn't.
It's going to be an interesting 4 years ahead. May be even 8.
I'm not a big fan of some of the positions that Bill gates has taken on political issues lately(such as increased taxes) but there's something he said about why America beat Japan in the computing industry that I can draw parallels on. Apparently, Japan's take was that there was only one way to pursue the PC industry. One strategy, one platform. America on the other hand allowed for a multi-pronged approach trying out different hardware and software combinations to see what works and letting the market determine the final outcome. America won, Japan lost.
If we must have public officials (and I don't think we should have quite as many but that's a topic for another day), then it would be better to have a way to quickly isolate the ones who don't deliver and remove them for good before more damage is done. If something they did works, we can pick other officials who promise to build on what the previous officials had done.
Congress has an incredibly low approval rating. I can't imagine we could do much to make it worse.. why not try experimenting in order to make it better?
Congress has a low approval rating because people mkstly disapprove of the choices made by people electing the 532 members that they don't get to vote. Individual members in their own district (for the House) or state (for the Senate) tend to have very good approval ratings.
The one way you could make Congress worse is to make it so that people didn't get the members they want in the elections they do vote in because their choices are even more restricted than they are now, while still hating the choices everyone else makes.
Term limits for Congress would be one way of achieving that.
No, both are bad ideas that don't solve the problem and actually make it worse.
Term limits: Does nothing to stop poor/corrupt lawmakers from holding office while also limiting the amount of ___domain knowledge present in Congress.
Lobbying ban: A shorter one already exists that is routinely ignored or skirted by claiming a different title/role while still being a lobbyist. Extending the ban is just asking for more people to flaunt it. The real solution is to aggressively enforce the ban or better yet, try and reduce the role of money in politics as much as possible. I doubt the latter is likely given the bank accounts of the cabinet appointees.
Term limits on Congress are one of those things that sound like a great idea—and aspects of them are—but when implemented they turn out to cause even more corruption.
California did this for their state legislature. The result was that there were no more long term legislators that knew the ropes and could guide new legislators and teach them how to do everything, and so the most experienced people around ended up being the lobbyists, who would come in and say "Oh, don't worry about it, we'll help you!" and then would go off and write the bills for people, etc.
there were no more long term legislators that knew the ropes
The term limits are specific to each house. There has been a tremendous amount of seat-trading (termed-out incumbent Senator running for Assembly seat, and vice-versa).
There is little of "teach them how to do everything"; it's more about (experienced leadership) telling them what to do regardless of tenure. Have you ever watched committee meetings? Understand the concept of "is this an 'A' vote or a 'B' vote", with members of whatever tenure marching in lock-step?
Many need Remedial Parliamentary Procedure 1A, and lots can't read legislation worth crap... including long-tenured ones. Otherwise, it's do-as-your-told-or-you-don't-get-campaign-money.
The problem isn't term limits; it's one-party rule.
It also means that someone in congress can't be rewarded after their term with a cushy job as a lobbyist. And a congressman that let lobbyists control them, wouldn't be able to receive funds as payment, election term after election term.
If this really was good for the lobbyists, it would have been done before.
The guy is president, but his kids are running his company. This seems like a massive conflict of interest. The guy has so many conflict of interests I don't know how he can justify others from not profiting off their political careers. It just seems super hypocritical.
The problem is ... his portfolio is not 'stocks and bonds' that he can easily liquidate, or put in a blind trust.
He has tons of huge properties - to put them up on the chopping block would mean a huge fire sale - and totally unfair.
I also saw a lawyer indicate that the buyers of such properties - because they'd be getting a bargain - could be perceived as getting massive 'favour' from the sitting president - and that in and of itself would be a major conflict of interest.
So in his defence - it's complicated.
That said - there should be a way of putting up a much bigger firewall between him and Trump Co.
As it stands, it's already bad ... foreign delegations - without pressuring - may feel incented to use 'Trump Hotels' etc. etc..
I think it's going to be a drag on him, because there'll be tons of people invariably using Trump-owned facilities - and every time it happens - it will be in the press, and it will look bad irrespective of if there was any wrongdoing.
It is a challenging and complicated issue, I will give Trump that much.
That being said, he has appeared to be entirely uninterested in doing much to resolve it.
"Oh, my family will look after it. Hey, family, come visit dignitaries with me." "Oh, they'll run it from New York. I'll spend a few nights a week in New York at my office there. We won't talk about anything business related, promise."
At the congressional level, all that term limits do is increase the power of unelected officials - specifically, lobbyists, executive appointees, and party thought-leaders who haven't held office in a decade, but end up running for President every single time.
It would be like a company firing all their engineers every 4 years, but keeping the management around. How good a product do you think that is likely to produce?
At the presidential level, term limits have the sole upside of preventing cults of personality from forming.
I propose we reduce the burden of raising children.
(by forcing people to sell their kids as food).
Disregarding the hyperbole (not to mention that the idea has been presented before, with mixed results), Trump's promises are suspect at best, and i would caution anyone thinking of "getting behind them".
This always comes across as condescending to me. You can caution me all you want. I can caution you about your political views too. Does cautioning people do anything?
Yes it does. I can caution a friend that's been spending his unemployment sitting around watching tv, or caution a stranger on the internet for trusting the promises of a populist politician. I'm not being condescending to either, but i am worried for both.
No idea how these people are elected, but maybe one option would be to make getting re-elected gradually more difficult. So a person aiming to serve for 3rd term would need more votes than person aiming for the 1st.
For people who oppose term limits, would you be on board for term limit of say, 30 years? How about 20? or 10? I think question isn't much about if there should be term limit but by how much. My theory is that term limits should be inversely proportional to amount of power. So 2 terms for presidents and may be 3 or 4 for others. No one in politics should be allowed to have power indefinitely. Its just not because people with decades in office have unfair advantage but new ideas should be given chance over old at some point.
I agree, if he spends more time working to improve the country and less time sitting on the toilet tweeting mean things he may actually win the popular vote in 2020.
Completely true, which is why I'm hoping that lawyers from organizations like the ACLU and NAACP will be included in the team. Hopefully they would be able to come up with a reasonable working definition of 'fair and representative' that can be optimized using publicly available information.
LOL never gonna happen. Congress hates trump and loves themselves. you honestly need to be living in a dream world to even THINK that Congress would pass a law restricting their income flow. These people made an exception to insider trading laws for themselves for christ's sake.
These are clearly impossible goals that are put on there so people can be like "See, Trump's not all that bad! He's gonna the drain the swamp!". But let's be real, it was never a priority and will never happen.
Good design and execution. I'll revisit this as the Trump presidency plays out.
Question: Can bias come into play when evaluating statements, and how will that be handled?
For example, taking the first item - building the wall and Mexico is fully reimbursing us - What if a US citizen chips in $10 to help? Is the promise broken? What about $100, $1,000, $1,000,000?
Another anecdote that's kind of relevant: I followed along with Politifact's 'Obameter' for awhile, and realized that making definitive and objective statements can be difficult. I think the most troublesome aspect was the claim that a promise was broken (creating negative connotations that come with a "Broken Promise" label) when the reality was that obstructionism prevented the promise from being fulfilled.
> Question: Can bias come into play when evaluating statements, and how will that be handled?
Bias will definitely come into things because the informal language we use is often not precise enough to allow exact yes/no answers and doing so is reductive.
TPP withdrawal isn't on here yet even though it has already been announced.
As bad as Trump is, we should celebrate the good policies and fight the bad ones. I'm optimistic about the TPP withdrawal, the policy removing two pieces of old regulation (a policy that's been implemented successfully in Canada[0]), FDA reform, cutting down on corruption, and cutting back lobbying. I'm pessimistic about the climate related policy, immigration policy, and especially scared about foreign policy.
>cutting down on corruption, and cutting back lobbying
Oh yea, like how Trump drained the swamp and staffed his administration with all these outsiders with fresh new ideas...oh wait, it's literally the RNC. And his Sec of State choice is the CEO of ExxonMobil and one of the campaign promises is literally to invest more in shale oil / natural gas / etc.
Give me a break. There is nothing worth celebrating in this kleptocracy and this wishy-washy "Oh let's focus on the good stuff!" only distracts from the facts.
What do you hope to achieve with such a reply, other than signalling that you hate Trump (which is a rather common sentiment here, so go you)?
At no point did they argue that this makes Trump good or even acceptable, and in fact they specifically mentioned things about Trump that scare them. I found the comment to be thoughtful and nice in light of this rather gloomy situation. Sometimes it's important to celebrate good things without yelling at each other.
I'm sorry for coming across as singling you out on this, but please don't consider the next paragraph aimed at you specifically.
The single thing that has bothered me most during this entire election is how both Trump voters and Hillary voters spent so much time basically yelling at each other in tribal fashion. My Facebook feed was dominated by mostly pro-Hillary people who decried anyone even remotely agreeing with Trump as racist, misogynist, rural uneducated shits, and a a pro-Trump person or two who kept posting about emails and pizza-related tinfoil hat theories (and that coming from someone who generally speaking is considered a bit of a conspiracy theorist). I know for a fact that a large portion of these posts served absolutely no good purpose I could imagine other than 'virtue signalling'.
I mean, don't get me wrong, if I had to pick a side I'd be in the Hillary camp. I have opinions too.
And sometimes I've expressed them in ways and places where it mostly just benefited me as a person somehow. I'm not perfect. But it frustrates me to no end to see people just yelling at each other. It seems less of an issue in my real-world interactions, but then my real world consists of people who mostly agree with me.
Without targeting you specifically, I really hope everyone here, myself included, can avoid being part of the screaming mobs. One of my favorite things about this place is that it still often challenges my thinking (I'm less of a functional programming zealot, and one of my new year's resolutions is to give emacs a real shot, for example), and I really hope we can at the very least bring some of this quality even to political discussions, because we do have a lot more influence than we think.
My hope was to show that any chance of "fighting corruption" is a sham and clearly a smoke-and-mirrors act used to distract from the high-level looting that is taking place. You'll notice that the OP edited their post to reflect this so obviously it had some impact beyond virtue signaling.
Personally, I found the comment to be incredibly unthoughtful, as they just posted the "nice" things that they teach you in politics 101 to put on your platform so that people will look at those and think "hey it's not so bad." I work in politics, I've lived in DC for twenty years, I've seen this exact scenario play out in the Bush years ("He has some good ideas! We can support those at least, right?") and we all know how that turned out for this country. Undue optimism and shallow political thinking doesn't exactly make for a "challenging" post.
Between being part of a "screaming mob" and standing by saying nothing as horror unfolds before us, I'll add my voice to the choir.
Who knows if you'll be right or everyone else will be right. We'll have to wait 4 years and see if Trump comes through with his promises.
Right now, you're acting like you're the only that is right and everyone is too stupid. You're acting very smug, the same smug that lost Hillary the election.
"In the entirely of the technological age, across the breadth of the world, you could probably count the number of people whose mind has been changed completely on a political or religious topic by a Facebook discussion on the fingers of both hands."
Free idea - why is there no public official who runs on a digital strategy? Like a localized reddit for policies and issues on local, state, and federal levels. If you add in some ML and AI, you could come up with truly direct democracy, that is 100% open and transparent.
Yes, this would be technically hard in that making it secure would take effort. But, in my mind, less effort than it would take to dismantle the electoral college, which has resulted in the opposite of direct democracy.
> why is there no public official who runs on a digital strategy?
Most people lack basic computer literacy
> truly direct democracy, that is 100% open and transparent
reddit, facebook, etc are all gamed by third parties
> less effort than it would take to dismantle the electoral college, which has resulted in the opposite of direct democracy
the founding fathers didn't want a direct democracy. Madison says “Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths … A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking."
It's not a new idea. We actually had a candidate like this in SF last cycle, I think for state senator. His schtick was that, if elected, he'd set up a site where his constituents could vote on every bill he saw and he would always follow what they said.
There's a huge number of problems with such a candidate. Here's a few:
* Technical problems. You can't hand-wave these as minor issues. They're practical/implementation issues, yes, but they're so difficult and pervasive that they elevate to the level of being fundamental problems with the idea. Spam, constituent authentication, Internet access for every constituent, Russian/Chinese tampering... These are problems that the major Silicon Valley companies have spent tons of resources on and not totally solved for their use, let alone for a use that controls the US military.
* The average American does not have any clue how government works. I do not want them directly voting on or writing laws. I wouldn't want me directly voting on or writing laws without a lot of time to study up first, and I think I know a lot more about US laws and history than most voters.
* The average American, even assuming potential competence, does not have enough time to read and understand all the things that go across a legislator's desk. This gets especially impossible when compromise deals need to be struck - "no unrelated amendments" is a great idea, except that then nobody would actually ever pass anything.
While I see the issues and have my doubts about feasibility, here's some thoughts:
> * Technical problems. You can't hand-wave these as minor issues. They're practical/implementation issues, yes, but they're so difficult and pervasive that they elevate to the level of being fundamental problems with the idea. Spam, constituent authentication, Internet access for every constituent, Russian/Chinese tampering... These are problems that the major Silicon Valley companies have spent tons of resources on and not totally solved for their use, let alone for a use that controls the US military.
Depending on what level the candidate operates, perhaps a solution would be to take great effort to develop a 'platform', demographically, that represents the constituency. Perhaps some form of compensation might be necessary to make this work (for, say, constituents who usually don't have time for this kind stuff).
> * The average American does not have any clue how government works. I do not want them directly voting on or writing laws. I wouldn't want me directly voting on or writing laws without a lot of time to study up first, and I think I know a lot more about US laws and history than most voters.
It could be a demand that everyone who is part of this 'platform' has to spend time understanding the problem. I recall reading some articles on how, when 'regular citizens' are given time to deliberate and receive information, they come to pretty sensible conclusions. Maybe the 'average voter' isn't as dumb as they seem when given the opportunity to think things through and be heard. I think learned helplessness plays a big role in the generally negative perception of the 'average voter'.
> * The average American, even assuming potential competence, does not have enough time to read and understand all the things that go across a legislator's desk. This gets especially impossible when compromise deals need to be struck - "no unrelated amendments" is a great idea, except that then nobody would actually ever pass anything.
The above might make this a little more achievable perhaps.
It's possible that I'm naive, but I believe it's possible for the 'average joe' to make informed decisions and strongly agree with people like Chomsky who argue that the problem is not lack of knowledge or interest, but rather the (correct) feeling that 'our' opinions don't matter or have much of an effect.
I think most people opt out of politics because of this, whether justified or not.
But go strike up a conversation about football, the intricacies of the show Westworld, or whatever else holds their interest, with the 'average joe', and it becomes immediately clear that they're not as dumb as they seem and quite capable of complex thought.
I'm no historian but I'm pretty sure that quite a few of the great thinkers in our past would imagine that the 'average person' is not capable of literacy or something like using a computer, and yet here we are.
>Like a localized reddit for policies and issues on local, state, and federal levels. If you add in some ML and AI, you could come up with truly direct democracy, that is 100% open and transparent.
This makes literally no sense. The US can't be a direct democracy just by throwing Silicon Valley buzz words at it. You need to change the very fundamental laws that set up the legislative systems.
You can use all this fancy 'tech' and make it seem like you are the bleed-edge innovator of the future of politics...Or you can do sane things that normal people will understand like ballot initiatives or more transparency in Congress.
Here, I'll be more specific for you since you seem to lack imagination.
Candidate in SF district declares run for CA state senate with most issues already set, either as a democrat or republican. Every SF resident gets access to an app and a vote on certain key issues. So issue of affordable housing and zoning laws comes up, constituents get to discuss and make arguments for each side amongst eachother. Maybe for this issue, they also get to vote, which will set this person's vote on the senate floor. Regardless, everyone else can publicly see the district's discussions, leanings, etc.
Maybe there's a way for constituents to propose new topics or referendums, or that only the top contributors or people with 'points' get to do so. Maybe points are earned through verifiable volunteer work, maybe through donation. Maybe it uses analysis of what everyone's discussing already on the site to put new issues on the table.
Maybe this starts at a small local level until you can prove with enough of a track record that this works better than current politicians. If it grows, it can become president.
The point is, we developed representation as a heuristic for networks, transparency, and access. We have the technology for those things today.
>Candidate in SF district declares run for CA state senate with most issues already set, either as a democrat or republican. Every SF resident gets access to an app and a vote on certain key issues. So issue of affordable housing and zoning laws comes up, constituents get to discuss and make arguments for each side amongst eachother. Maybe for this issue, they also get to vote, which will set this person's vote on the senate floor. Regardless, everyone else can publicly see the district's discussions, leanings, etc.
How is this any different than going to the candidate's town hall forums and asking them questions? Or keeping up with their views on their own site and emailing their aides with questions and concerns? Or hell, even engaging with them on Twitter (which, fwiw, seems to be one of the more effective means of petitioning these days.) Furthermore, legislative discussions are for the most part a matter of public record. There are great sites that help people with finding out where candidates and parties stand on issues, both federal, state, and local- https://ballotpedia.org/California .
>Maybe there's a way for constituents to propose new topics or referendums
> or that only the top contributors or people with 'points' get to do so. Maybe points are earned through verifiable volunteer work, maybe through donation. Maybe it uses analysis of what everyone's discussing already on the site to put new issues on the table.
Do you not see how ridiculous this sounds? So the people with more free time and money get to determine the political discourse?
a) Politics is usually not a "yes" and "no" to individual questions, you have to have a consistent set of answers that e.g. balances the budget. Of you vote on each post individually you would just get huge costs and no income.
Perhaps taking the average across lots of complete budgets would kinda work. It could also fail to have a strategy though (fall in a minimum beween two local maxima).
b)
Also I would much rather that someone who is paid to work in politics fulltime vote on some questions. The populace cannot educate themselves on every single issue.
So typically idiots who think the world is simple and answers obvious go and confidently vote, while the educated reflected crowd who say "I don't know" until they have thoroughly studied the issue stay at home?
One could have popular votes on individual hot topics though. See Brexit..
It could still be the same republic we have now, but with an extremely accessible and simple system for looking up who is running for what position when and a short bio about them.
We should be doing more work that allows as many people as possible to become well-informed with as little friction as possible.
Can you imagine the response if a President Elect Hillary acted even a little like Trump has? If she put out even one childish tweet? If there was even a hint of the kinds of rumors about kompromat or direct ties to, say, Chinese influence -- let alone a real (whether or not it's legitimate information) dossier passed from John McCain to intelligence agencies? If the first white house press conference went even a little bit like how Trump's went? If she threatened to put Trump in jail to his face on live TV and then immediately backpedaled after being elected? If her approval rating was as low as Trump's is, and she accused the media of rigging approval polls? Imagine her picking Tillerson and people from Goldman Sachs for her cabinet.
If you want to talk about hypothetical double standards I want to get to the bottom of this one first.
My point was more around the shotgun blast of campaign promises she put out. How should we measure that? If Trump nails even a few of his promises, he might arguably meet more of his campaign promises than HRC would have.
Yes there absolutely is a double standard here. Trump is not judged the same as a career politician.
He needs to be, despite the fact that at times he's acted like his Presidency is something he'll fit in around everything else he has going on.
And you can't really point to HRC and say that she put out a shotgun blast of campaign promises. Trump has done the same.
I won't argue that in any case, increased monitoring and accountability of those in positions of power and / or influence should be something we strive for, regardless of affiliation.
Considering the amount of conspiracy nuts who make it their life goal to pin everything on the Clintons and the amount of mainstream attention they got + the rabid anti-Hillary sentiment on the right, my answer is "absolutely".
Whether you are a Trump supporter or not, it's difficult to suggest that he is not radically different than other politicians and tremendously polarizing. Some see that as a sign of much needed change and other see it as a potential threat to democracy. Clinton was seen as largely a continuation of politics as normal so it would seem unlikely that there would have been large protests - perhaps more Tea Party protests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_protests) or an increased presence at the existing standing conservative marches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Life_(Washington,_D.... etc).
Who said anything about protesting? Either way, yea, I doubt there'd be as big of a protest (there would still be a lot, remember the tea party?) because H was an actual rational candidate who may have had some questionable views but didn't insult war heroes, slander entire ethnicities, and brag about sexual assault? It's pretty obvious why Trump is unpopular and why people are protesting him. I don't really see the point of your comment other than to stir up nothing. Are you really trying to have a discourse about this? Somehow I doubt it.
> I don't really see the point of your comment other than to stir up nothing.
She was running on a campaign of starting a war with Russia. If you see sending mostly poor folks from cities and the Bible Belt over to die in Syria or wherever as being 'nothing' then I have no problem stirring that up.
We certainly shouldn't condone Trump's comments about women. But if you think his comments magically erase, say, the Clinton's role in the HIV epidemic then I think you're drinking the Kool-Aid. So yeah, I protested Trump, and if Clinton had won I'd be protesting her also.
>But if you think his comments magically erase, say, the Clinton's role in the HIV epidemic then I think you're drinking the Kool-Aid.
Never said anything like that. I have no love for hillary and did not vote for her but dude get over it. Anti-Hillary people are actually like stalkers and they can't seem to just let it go. She lost, she's not the problem right now. Please stop making every Trump thing into a Trump vs. Clinton thing
I think we wouldn't have seen millions protesting because Trump supporters were overwhelmingly not from cities. Where it is much easier to get hundreds of thousands together.
62% of the US population lives in cities. Trump got 46% of the popular vote. What you are saying is just barely mathematically possible and most likely untrue.
The extent to which the Clintons undergo the "conspiracy" treatment is almost comical. There are entire galaxies of blogs and sites dedicated to teasing out symbolism from the most mundane of details. See: pizzagate.
You mean like when Hillary Clinton repeatedly invoked the existence of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her and Bill back in the 90's? Yes, that was comical.
Anyway, pizzagate is a well known hoax. Does that somehow cancel out all the other conspiracies that surround the Clintons? Logically it does not but most people are only thinking at a 3rd grade level so it's a great distraction.
Where there's smoke, there's fire and there's plenty of evidence to support the Clintons selling nuclear secrets to China, smuggling drugs with the CIA at Mena Airport and of course the infamous "body count".
Is it? I haven't found any solid debunking of the really weird aspects (handkerchief email). The wikipedia article lists [1] and [2] as citations for the word "debunked", but both don't really offer any compelling argument except the general preposterousness of the crazy 4chan talk. But there are no alternative, plausible explanations for the weird, code-like language of some of the emails.
Please point me to better debunkings if you know or can find out.
Yes, it is. Tons of media outlets have investigated it and found nothing. Even if they had found some tiny sliver of evidence—which they didn't—it wouldn't prove that there was a conspiracy, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
There's infinitely more reason to believe the Steele dossier is true than Pizzagate, but at the moment we have to assume it is false too, because the evidence just hasn't shown up.
> But there are no alternative, plausible explanations for the weird, code-like language of some of the emails.
Maybe, just maybe, when John Podesta talked about pizza, he was actually talking about pizza.
Sure there are all the political reasons to wonder. And also, Trump made a lot of specific pledges such as the wall, repealing Obamacare, cutting corporate tax rate. In each case it's easy to say whether it was done or not. So there's more opportunity to do this with him.
Nice work on them spelling the ___domain incorrectly.
"Meter" is a device used to measure things, or as in musical time. "Metre" is almost exclusively a unit of distance. It's not called a "speedometre" unless you're French.
What are you talking about? Obama got literally the same treatment. Every president going forward will get the same treatment, and that's a good thing!
I also found this to be a conundrum for Democrats. Should they hold Donald to his promises and chastise him when he doesn't follow through? Or, should they welcome his failures as said policies would be damaging to the Democratic cause? The answer is probably a little of both, but one wonders if that's the path they truly want to take given how "crossing the isle" is perceived come election day.
One example is the ACA/Obamacare. Trump has sent very conflicting messages about repealing it but keeping some of the more popular parts.
I think many people are concerned by Trump precisely because he has been so slippery on many issues and has the unique ability of being able to stand for and against something at the same time.
What exactly do you find wrong with Common Core standards? All I've seen against it are poorly-graded homework examples turned meme without proper context.
I think it's extremely dangerous when the federal government dictates almost all aspects of how people should lead their lives especially when it comes to education where there's always a threat of indoctrination on large scale. Communities should be able to set their own standards. People aren't as dumb as that; such that federal government shepherding is required at every turn.
Common Core was neither developed nor mandated by the federal government, it is adopted as a mandate by numerous states independently, and developed as an initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.
The federal government dictates very little of the substance of what is taught in schools.
True and thank the Almighty for that, but the general direction is towards that. The main issue of contention here is centralization. Once that is done, it becomes easier for the federal govt to take it over. I don't want anything that remotely resembles that.
U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top competitive grants on July 24, 2009, as a motivator for education reform. To be eligible, states had to adopt "internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the work place."[15] Though states could adopt other college- and career-ready standards and still be eligible, they were awarded extra points in their Race to the Top applications if they adopted the Common Core standards by August 2, 2010.
Until the Every Student Succeeds Act was passed in December 2015, the US Department of Education had encouraged states to adopt the Common Core Standards by tying the grant of waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act to adoption of the Standards.
Yes, the States were offered extra funding for adopting the Common Core. They were not forced to take it, but who doesn't want a few million dollars, right?
Doesn't the federal government have enough on its plate? It seems like this insatiable beast that won't stop until it has taken over every last bit of personal liberty and freedom including what and how to think. That is the fear.
People truly are "that dumb" at the community level- at least the sorts of people elected to local educatipn boards. Even at the state level, we've seen disastrous anti-evolution, anti-climate change education agendas attempted to be pushed through, not to mention highly politicized conservative historical revisionism, just within the last 16 years. Common core is a good idea for several reasons, not least that.
Ideas (you can call them opinions if you'd like, it makes no difference) backed by scientific inquiry, consensus, and fact are the ones we should be teaching, end of story. The educational system is an intrinsic aspect of our society and has an enormous impact on the well-being of our societies and planet. It's am essential life goal of mine and of many others in science to work to improve and protect it. People opposed to an educational system that values scientific thinking and literacy have lost battles for the last 600 years and will continue to do so.
> A requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations be dropped.
> Under Chief of Staff Reince Priebus issued a memorandum (pg. 1, pg. 2) asking federal agency heads to postpone or freeze any new or pending regulations, with some exceptions noted in Sec. 3 of the memo.
From the memo:
"""
Notify the OMB Director promptly of any regulations that, in your view, should be excluded from the directives ... because those regulations affect critical health, safety, financial, or national security matters ... The OMB Director will review any such notifications and determine whether such conclusion is appropriate under the circumstances.
"""
I agree that non-elected policymakers have too much power to enact regulations with criminal penalties under force of law, but I feel that this measure will just lead to more policies being labeled "health" or "national security" etc., and not amount to any real reduction in regulation.
I love this, maybe instead of track-trump.com should be track-potus.com - it would much less polarising/partisan... Now it looks as if it is run by the DMC...
This could, and should, be used for every president.
It has clearly been created to prove Trump in particular won't (or will, who knows) hold his promises, but the execution is actually pretty great and is definitively applicable to any other president. Or political figure for what it's worth
Yes. I'd love to see this for England. Not just for the party who gets in, but for the opposition too. They said all this in their manifesto; here's how they voted.
>Fully fund the construction of a wall on our border with Mexico, with the “full understanding that the country of Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such wall”. [Pure manchild wish fulfillment]
>Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities.
>Lift the roadblocks on energy infrastructure projects like the Keystone Pipeline and allow them to move forward.
>Lift the restrictions on $50 trillion dollars’ worth of American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas, and clean coal. [I'm sure Secretary of State Tillerson's Exxon holdings won't benefit from this at all...no sir, this is just to help the public!]
>A hiring freeze on all federal employees (except for the military, public safety, and public health) [Because who needs jobs right? It's not like the Federal gov't is one of the nation's biggest employer and source of good jobs]
>Cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum, and order issued by President Obama. ['unconstitutional' lol]
>Reduce the business tax rate from 35% to 15%.
>An act to allow school choice. [i.e. defund public schools]
No, this is a garbage plan which will strip the public of the property and rights they deserve and basically funnel more money into Trump's and Co's coffers.
"which will strip the public of the property and rights they deserve "
I don't see how any Americans 'property or rights' are being abrogated there.
> In Canada, we manage our borders effectively. We're not some fascist state. I don't think it's 'totalitarian' for US gov to responsibly implement the very fair immigration laws on the books.
> Pipelines are all over America. They're not evil. Granted, those that do actual damage should not be allowed - but the process is politicized in both directions.
> "State Tillerson's Exxon holdings won't benefit" - Tillerson has absolved his stockholdings in Exxon. He's as free to buy and sell Oil stocks as you and I are.
> A 'hiring freeze' on government staff is not entirely irresponsible wherein there is bloat. The highest media wage in the US is - guess where? Washington DC. The bloat in DC is epic. At least the sentiment to want to do something about that is reasonable.
> "Reduce the business tax rate from 35% to 15%." - it's not going to be done across the board. He's going to create a VAT system which every other country has. (Meaning US does not pay taxes on products they export - same as other countries) The US without VAT is at a huge competitive disadvantage. This is actually one of the most ridiculously obvious things the US should have done a long time ago. This is not contentious really.
> Allowing parents to choose schools is not 'defunding' public schools, it's allowing people to take public money allocated to their students and put it into the school of their choice. No money is coming out of the system. I understand that it's contentious, but it's irresponsible to position this as 'defunding' public schools.
Most of the items on this list are reasonable. People are getting in a huff about it because it's 'Trump' and they can't stand that.
If he can do just 'the better 1/2' of that list, America will be in much better shape.
Eventually a Democrat will come along and put together some more socially oriented legislation.
If you really believe Tillerson has absolved all of his holdings and won't benefit, I have a hotel on Columbus Circle to sell you. His $500 billion oil deal with Putin was interrupted because of Obama's sanctions and now he's Sec of State and the Trump administration is all buddy buddy with Russia? Come on.
>A 'hiring freeze' on government staff is not entirely irresponsible wherein there is bloat. The highest media wage in the US is - guess where? Washington DC. The bloat in DC is epic. At least the sentiment to want to do something about that is reasonable.
First off, I highly doubt it is the clerical / less-unskilled staff that is making those numbers so high and those are the type of jobs that will be mosty affected by the freeze. Is it really "bloat" if it's giving people livelihoods and jobs? Almost all white-collar jobs are "bloat", there are very few actually essential duties that need to be taken care of. If anything, federal employment it's one of the best support infrastructures and safety nets we have since our welfare is in such disarray.
> Allowing parents to choose schools is not 'defunding' public schools, it's allowing people to take public money allocated to their students and put it into the school of their choice.
"School choice" is just the rhetorical term used by the right to indicate the rise of private and charter schools, which don't need to follow those pesky federal regulations. Again, I also don't take the term at face value - did you even watch the Betsy DeVos confirmation hearing? It was pathetic.
>Most of the items on this list are reasonable. People are getting in a huff about it because it's 'Trump' and they can't stand that. If he can do just 'the better 1/2' of that list, America will be in much better shape.
Yea they are so bent out of shape that a thin-skinned narcissist rapist wants to basically loot the country with his cronies. The nerve of some people!
"If you really believe Tillerson has absolved all of his holdings and won't benefit, I have a hotel on Columbus Circle to sell you."
Tillerson has also made a deal whereby he can't work Oil and Gas for the next 10 years.
The deal is with the State Department - are you saying the State Department is lying?
There is also specific Congressional oversight for Tillerson (which does not apply to Trump, by the way).
So enough conspiracy theories - either put up some evidence of your claim that somehow Tillerson will not sell his shares - or don't make the comment.
"Is it really "bloat" if it's giving people livelihoods and jobs?"
Wow ... Yes! The very fact that you'd leave aside government workers actual ability to be productive, and just assume that 'giving people money' is somehow a 'good thing' for governance, makes me question the premise of your rebuttal.
""School choice" is just the rhetorical term"
Except it's not. When people can take their government vouchers to the schools of their choice, this is 'choice'. Not 'defunding public schools'. You're the one making the rhetorical leap here.
"Yea they are so bent out of shape that a thin-skinned narcissist rapist wants to basically loot the country with his cronies"
Take this kind of stuff to Huffpost, you'll find like minded people there.
I don't really like Trump, but the list is not remotely unreasonable.
"Force schools to compete" I don't think this is it.
'Competition' is definitely not the right word for education.
The best education systems in the world: S. Korea, Finland - are not competitive in the least.
If you have good students (re: good parents), decent teachers, a classroom, textbooks and a chalkboard - you're going to get a good education.
The 'choice' issue I think is important when it comes to alternative and special interest schools - in particular those in hard-up places: they have Charter Schools with very special types of programs geared towards kids from rougher districts etc.. Or maybe an ethnic/religious slant i.e. 'Ukranian school' or 'Catholic School' - neither of which would be entirely different from a public school, other than at a 'Catholic' or 'Ukranian' school there would be a 'Christmas Concert' instead of a 'Winter Concert'. But still, culture is important.
Forcing schools into heavy competition I think will just have them focus on the wrong things, marketing themselves, inflating numbers, managing perception - and that's wasteful.
And as long as the 'common core' is not too onerous - I think it's probably ok as well. I mean, who'd be against basic reading, writing and arithmetic?
> Yea they are so bent out of shape that a thin-skinned narcissist rapist wants to basically loot the country with his cronies. The nerve of some people!
Speaking as a non-american who strongly dislikes Trump and his plans... could you please, kindly not stoop to the level of his tweets when arguing politics? You're ruining your own arguments by doing that.
Why should my tax dollars get to fund religious schools? I don't want to have to support religion and I don't think the federal government should mandate that I have to pay tax to do that.
I'm a lifelong atheist and it doesn't bother me. The public education I received was rather subpar in my opinion and I probably would have fared better in an environment like a catholic school. If a voucher program was implemented I might even consider sending my future children to one. The primary points of contention between the atheist and the religious person are how the universe was created and what happens after you die. Both have very little effect on actual day to day living.
"The primary points of contention between the atheist and the religious person are how the universe was created and what happens after you die."
No, totally not.
Do you know who conceived of the 'Big Bang'?
It was Father David LeMaitre - a Catholic Priest - and Physicist.
The Catholic Church is 100% behind the 'big bang' and 'evolution'. There's little dissonance between the church and science.
The 'difference' between atheists and religious types - should be better described as the difference between 'materialists' and 'spiritualists'.
'Materialists' (atheists are usually de-facto this) - believe that the material world is all there is, and that's that.
'Spiritualists' believe that life is an expression of something greater.
'Science' is actually rooted in Metaphysics, which is the trunk of the tree below 'Physics' (see Descartes). The problem with most scientists/rationalist/atheists today is that they have forgotten their metaphysical underpinnings ...
"Both have very little effect on actual day to day living."
I see what you're saying - but maybe not.
If you believe in something greater than you, you might be more inclined to think much more long term, make sacrifices for the greater good, for the community, for future generations.
If one believes that 'this is all there is', then one might be inclined to simply pursue highly selfish and hedonists endeavours, because after all 'sympathy' and 'empathy' are just 'emotions' - and in a purely material world there is no 'right and wrong' etc.
It'd be nice if all schools at least taught metaphysics in high school, i.e. the underpinning of how we think about the universe. As it stands, most public schools teach a very materialist viewpoint by default.
And yes, there are tons of atheists in 'Catholic Schools' because they tend to be very good. You should wonder why all those crazy religious catholics basically invented common education as we understand it, and established most of the best universities (100% of the Ivy League, Cambridge, Oxford etc. etc. :) :) (mostly not Catholic, but religious nonetheless)
Anyhow - it'd be nice for people to have a little more choice in education, without having to entirely deconstruct public education, which is important.
This is my point. We all want food in our bellies, a roof over our heads and a safe place for our kids to play. The metaphysical world plays no role in that. Thus, it isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.
Carl Sagan was able to explain how I feel better than I ever could when he commented on this image:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
"Why should my tax dollars get to fund religious schools?"
Why should religious people have to pay for your kid's secularist education, which may include elements that are totally inconsistent with their moral worldview?
Public schools are important, but so is choice.
Vouchers are a reasonable idea, and they just might be one of the key ways to help developing communities improve - as many of the best schools in hard-up areas are 'Charter Schools' which could use the funding and students to do a lot of good.
Because if you take the word 'secular' away, you have a base which is remarkably the same: "secular education" versus "education".
When you do the opposite, in direct contradiction with some of the founding principles of the country, you get "religious education".
What's the difference, you ask? Religious education oftentimes teaches things we _know_ to be _factually incorrect_, many of those around creationism being the most obvious, but not the only.
> Why should my tax dollars get to fund religious schools?
They already do: your public school taxes fund schools which advocate a particular way of life & looking at the world — i.e., a religion.
Far better, I think, to let all parents determine which religion they wish their children to be brought up in, than to only allow that privilege to those wealthy enough to afford it. Coincidentally, school choice & vouchers are likely to lead to improved educational outcomes, because parents will be able to choose schools that (they believe) are better.
One negative outcome would be that schools would be forced to advertise & market themselves, which means that a school which is academically better but markets less will be perceived to be worse than it is. I don't know how to solve that problem, but I think it's less of a problem that the current set of problems.
It seems like it is not virtuous in wanting to help the 500+ men and women succeed in our capital.
Tracking a persons actions or promises is used to terminate employees. Tracking (personal / individual level ) is not used - especially sharing ones results with others - to improve a process or reduce a cost etc...
If this is just about the assumption that trump will fail or needs to be removed from office, then the energy should be spent on that sole task
Is flagging this post a bad idea? I mean, these months the world is following trump presidency with a lot of uncertainty and fear and that's why politics was almost forbidden from HN. This post contradicts the previous HN position and will ignite a lot of hate.
Politics wasn't "almost forbidden". We did an experiment for a few days just to see what would happen. (One thing that happened, btw, is that many people didn't hear the 'experiment' part and jumped straight to 'politics are banned from HN forever', which was never the case.)
The policy then reverted, as planned, to the way it's always been: most politics are off topic, but not all (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If there's an intellectually interesting aspect to the story, it's more likely to be ok, while garden-variety politics definitely aren't.
I love politics but it will be very easy to fill HN front page with a lot of political stories now. Just ask people who "survived" this kind of populists presidents around the world.
For example, last December Argentina would be allowed to export lemons to US [1] Today, this was put on hold [2] which is in line with Trump promises but not with a 10 year long bilateral negotiations between Argentina and US.
Sorry to nitpick, but I want to emphasize that we did this as part of an explicitly temporary experiment, to see what we would learn. It's true that we ended it early, but that was because we learned everything we needed in the first couple days. A week turned out to be too long for this kind of thing, especially because there are downsides to doing it (that was one of the things we learned!)
It was both widely criticized and widely supported. The data suggested more HN readers liked it than disliked it.
Now dang, those are alternative facts. [Aieow don't hit me - I'm kidding]
The ban was very welcome imho, we could all use that break following the election. But I personally only liked it because it was temporary. I'd feel very differently had it been permanent or long term.
One downside was that because many people didn't hear the 'temporary' part, the longer we kept it running the more confusion was created about what the permanent policy is. Something like "most but not all politics is off-topic, except for this week when it's temporarily all off-topic" turned out to be too complicated.
Another is that the political flamewarring didn't diminish, but merely shifted to arguing about site policy and the experiment. Indeed, it probably ticked up rather than down.
Another is that many good stories that were clearly on-topic for HN but also had political aspects were excluded, making the front page worse not better.
The bottom line is we can't run an experiment like this without changing the site itself in unintended ways. HN is a complex system that way. 'Do no harm' is at the top of our list, and we learned that there's a big leap in potential harm when you go from a 1-2 day timeframe to a week. So I'm sure we were right to end the experiment early; my internal "are things ok" geiger counter was bleeping like crazy at that point.
I am talking about the list of promises. I am not judging Trump himself, and I actually don't like him. But I like what he's promised and I think it could work.
One good example is the promise to cut funding to "sanctuary cities". It is unbelievable that breaking federal laws does not result in severe federal penalties.
>You mean the Affordable Care Act, the one that, once repealed, will put dozens of Americans I know into serious mortal peril?
But if not repeal, will leave me homeless, since I won't be able to pay the mortgage bill anymore.
Why do your friends get priority over me? Why do I have to lose my house so your friends can have health care? What about me? What about all those other people, left behind by Obama's presidency?
Well, we at least know what they did. They voted for Trump.
