0020 Sir Gene Speaks Term Limits

Today. I want to jump right in with a topic that I mentioned before, but I think it's pretty important to keep bringing up to the surface. And that is term limits for politicians. I would say at every level, regardless of whether it's federal or state or local government term limits would help improve government in this country, any country for that matter. Let's jump right in. I mentioned, I think previously that I had actually written a paper many years ago, almost 30 years ago when I was actually probably over 30 years ago at this point when I was in high school about the benefit of term limits and how they could solve some of the problems that I was seeing with government. In the late 1980s. Well, I certainly have not re-read that paper, but I have a general idea of what I probably put in it. I don't think my views on this have changed drastically. But what's sad is that now 30 years later, I think had term limits been imposed or I guess voted in place. We may not be anywhere in the crap situation than where we are with politics today. The reason for that is because term limits, incentivize people wanting to be in politics in order to make a difference, make a change from what happened, the previous administration. Rather than people getting into politics in order to become millionaires, certainly on the the federal level and become richer, if not millionaires on the state level politicians, but the vast majority of them view their political appointments as their job now, to be fair for many of them, that is a. A full-time job and certainly constituents expect you to be working full-time once they've elected you to do the things that you promised you were going to do when you were campaigning. So why would it not be a full-time job? Well, fair enough. I don't think politics necessarily needs to be a part-time job, but I do think politics is something that was never really intended in this country. To be a lifelong vocation. I think the goal of the original founders of the U S was very much that politics is what you do in between your real job and maybe your retirement. So if you're a business owner, you're a carpenter, you're a farmer. You're whatever that, as you get older and presumably wiser, you would start getting the itch, the drive. To make America be better for the next generation than it was for your generation. And that's when you would have the financial stability in your older years, presumably to be able to go into politics, to be able to potentially, and actually likely make less money during the years that you were in office as a politician. Then you had previously doing whatever it is you were doing before for your normal job and doing this towards the end of your life. You could not only bring the experience with you and be able to afford to do it, but that would be something that you would not strive to end up being your full-time application. You would retire after your political office. So whether you're. Certainly you can have hobbies, but whether your job was farmer, let's say initially, and then you built a successful farm as a result of that. You've experienced the hardships and tribulations that have to do with farming and you'd gather ideas in your younger years on boy, if things were only different. This could have helped and then be able to bring that when you run for the state Senate, for example, or the state house, or even the federal office to take those learned experiences and make good arguments from a practical experience standpoint, why changes should happen and why changes should be enacted by the legislature in order to improve things for the next generation of farmers or whoever. So with that sort of being the initial idea I think politics, if you look at the history of people that were elected politics did tend to attract people who were both successful and at the latter stages of their careers and even their lives. I'm sure that there's some woke. Percentage of the population that would just start pointing fingers saying, well, all you're doing is making an argument for old white man to come in there be politicians and nobody else. Well, I would say if the only people that are successful and the old and have the gumption to run for office, then I don't see an artificial reason for living it. But there's no really natural reason why he wouldn't only be old white men that would be doing it. I do think age has a certain benefit. And in fact, sir, for the presidency, at least that is codified in the constitution, that the person that is running for president, or that will be elected president needs to be at least 35 years of age to be a United States president because. Remember, this is this was put in place and the end of the 17 hundreds. When the average life expectancy was significantly shorter. Now, I don't remember off the top of my head if it was around 50 years old or maybe it was 60, but it was certainly not the seventies and approaching 80 that we have right now in the United States. I think Japan's are over 80 for the average life expectancy. So life expectancy has definitely grown in the last 200 years, predominantly due to preventable diseases. Or the prevention of diseases. We've been able to control more things over the life of a person. So they've lived longer, but even at a time when people live to somewhere between 50 and 60 on average, the founders thought that it was important that a person was at least middle age, which 35 years old, if you're going to live to 55 is about right. Before assuming the office of president. So why, if that is good for the president, would that not be a good thing for the other offices? Well, I can certainly think of some counterarguments saying that while you want to represent people at various stages in life. And I would agree with that. That's good to have some diversity there. But I would also say that it is unquestionable. By anyone who has lived a life of at least let's say 40 years, you start noticing in your late thirties, you definitely notice it in your forties. but by the time you're 50, you're absolutely looking at it with 100% confidence that man was I an idiot in my twenties and even my thirties, I was a lot more prone to be influenced by things that were. In retrospect, fairly stupid in your twenties is when you make mistakes. And your twenties is when you get drinking out of your system in your twenties is when you are driven by emotion, driven by things like love. This is when we fall in love and get married without really thinking about. All the all the hard work that's going to entail, especially if you have kids for the next 20 years, if people in their twenties realized how much work it is being married, I'm not sure that a lot of them would have ever gotten married. That was the big secret, right? As people that are older, never tell the youngsters how hard it is being married. And by not telling younger people what it's like once you're married and you have kids, it kind of Lowes them into this safety net of thinking, well, I'm in love with this person, right? You have these great feelings, these emotions, these endorphins, it's going to be perfect. It will have a perfect life just like it is movie. Of course, all of us that have lived past the, our twenties realize that is a crock of bullshit. Not to poopoo marriage in general, but simply to raise the point that when people are in their forties, fifties, maybe sixties, although I would look at sixties as the age of retirement, more than anything, there is a very, there's a strong. Rationale for having people at that age, being involved in politics simply because their life experiences have brought a lot of personal experiences to bear, including experiences of tolerance of working with people that are not just like you, which in our twenties and younger that is not something that is natural. It can be perceived right now, very easily with the the black lives matter and all these other movements where it's literally people in their early twenties going out, yelling, screaming, and DRA banging drums and telling everybody else, including people who don't really want to listen to them, how everybody has to be tolerant. Now, the irony of that. Is completely they're completely blind to it. The people acting this out, the people in their twenties that are ready to beat up a Nazi for being different than them. The people that are ready to burn down businesses because they. Somehow, maybe didn't put up a flyer that said black lives matter on the side of the building. These are the people that are trying to enforce tolerance. That is ridiculous to anybody older than that age. Any of us that have lived our lives have experienced enough diversity in their lives to frankly not give a shit about what people look like or what they do in their bedrooms or anything else, because it doesn't really affect us. And it's energy that is wasted, that would be better spent on making our own lives better and the lives of our children better. So having people that are highly emotional, And blacking life experiences in political office is generally not a good thing. Okay. So where am I going with this? So what I'm saying is it's best to have people with some experience. So having people in their twenties like AOC, although I guess she's over 30 now. She, I think she was in their twenties when she first came into office. While it's wildly entertaining and it has generated tons of revenue for news media, and that's, without a doubt, having her in office is helping to sell. Airtime for television networks, it's helping to sell newspapers for well, for newspapers or whatever they are these days online. They're websites that seem to decide that they want to charge you money for looking at their website which is a funny concept in and of itself. So w why would you have somebody like an AOC in office and what are the downsides to that? Well, As I mentioned previously, one of the upsides, although I don't think it's over overruled by the downsides or rather it is overruled by the downsides. It's not an upside that's high enough to justify it is just from bringing somebody in with a slightly different perspective. And certainly we've seen plenty of examples and laughed with plenty of examples of congressmen. In their sixties and seventies, trying to make laws relating to new media or technology or electronics. For those of us that are a little older, we remember when the congressional hearings were being held about including DVD or even CD copyright protection mechanisms and how important it is to include a non breakable. A way to protect the contents of those discs. And most of that was going over Congress people's heads like back then, and there's been plenty of examples of that. But aside from having a slightly younger person in Congress to understand technology most of the end result are really they're negatives, not positives because. One of the things that bringing in fresh blood like that does is it brings somebody in who now will see being in Congress, being a politician as their career. Now in AOC case, I, she was probably a great barista and look at what has been taken away from the city of New York, a barista by bringing her into Congress. So it's a bad exchange, no matter how you look at it. But in a all kidding aside, obviously what it has also done is it's made her realize, Hey, not only am I making more money working in Congress than I would as a barista, but I have way more power. And if I can leverage the power, not for the good of what I would have thought before I joined, but for whatever it takes to stay in here longer. Then that will ensure that I become a millionaire because we know again from a historical evidence, that 100% of the people that end up in the U S Congress. Well, I shouldn't say Congress, I should say specifically in the Senate, because there are people on the house side that, that are there for two years, and then for whatever reason they're gone and they, two years is not long enough to become a millionaire. But absolutely 100% of the senators are millionaires and nowhere near a hundred percent of the centers were millionaires before they came senators. In fact, I think that was like 36% or something like that are already millionaires by the time they get into the Senate. So it's a huge transformative job, which incidentally I believe it pays under$200,000 a year to be a Senator, but somehow magically. If you're a Senator, you ended up becoming a millionaire. AOC, I think, is going to be a very good example of that. That's somebody that's come into the house as managed to, well, however, she won the first election. Doesn't matter the point that she got in there, but then she is now won her second election to be in there. And I think that with each subsequent election, there's a. A higher and higher chance of victory as is on the average. And this is a, actually I was looking at some stats earlier, so I don't have the exact number, but I'll give you the rough number, which I think is very close. Only 10% of incumbents are replaced at each election for the federal office. That's it? Which means 90% of the people that run as an incumbent end up staying in the office. That is horrible. That is a horrible statistic, because what it's essentially saying is that once you get in, if you've managed to crack that nut, if you've managed to somehow manage to get in, once your odds of no longer being a member of Congress have been dropped down to only 10%, once you're in only 10% of you will ever stop being there. Other than for voluntary reasons. Now, Congress, people are clearly retired at some point, some will move into other positions. Some of them ended up being the vice president or president, but in general, once you're in Congress, you're not quite guaranteed, but you're damn near guaranteed that you're going to be there. And again, the reason for this, well, I guess, let me talk about part two, which is why this is a bad thing. And then part three will be why it's perpetuated. So if I forget about part three, you guys should remind me as I'm talking. So part two, why is this a bad thing? It is a bad thing for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I touched on lightly, which is that if you treat being. A politician as your lifelong advocation, that is your job. And the way that you end up being a politician who has a job who's working is by convincing people to vote for you. Then you will naturally spend the majority of your time and energy and potentially money on that thing, which enables to keep you being a politician. So it's like hiring somebody. Let's say it's like hiring an engineer to be an engineer in the business, but you're only going to pay them to be an engineer as long as they keep convincing you that they're an engineer that should be working for you. Well, you contrast that to somebody that's hired as an engineer and their goal isn't to keep being reelected as an engineer. But their goal is whatever, they're assigned as a project, they're trying to do a specific I don't set of tasks or a specific function they're working on or a specific product they're designing or building rather. So your, the way that politics works, you're effectively bringing people in that are guaranteed to spend over 50% of their energy. On trying to get back in into that same position and look, the percentages might vary, but I'm can say with a high degree of confidence, it's over 50% and what are the things they need to do in order to be reelected? Well, they need to make the people that elected them in the first place. Relatively happy. Now there, there is some minimum level of happiness that you need to hit and anything above that level, doesn't really affect things. So you need to, as a politician, figure out where is the minimum level of happiness that will get me reelected and then go for hitting that level. And then the other 49% of your job, you can focus on doing well. Other things, whatever you want. Maybe you want more money. So you work with more lobbyists that will be donating money, doing book deals and all kinds of essentially quasi illegal, or let's just say legal activities that ultimately will result in you making money. So th there's a very much, a first part of the job is keeping the job. Second part of the job is using the job to make the most amount of money. And then the third part of the job is really it's doing something that helps the first two areas, which is maximizing your power. And this could involve going from one political office to a broader or bigger political office. It could involve. Just gaining positions within your political party, so that you're more influential, even though you're still holding the same office as you are. If you're in the house, obviously the, the freshmen that gets in is going to be put on the crappiest committees and is going to have the least amount of power. Once you've been in there for a while. In fact, the ultimate position would be to be elected as speaker of the house by everybody else in the house, which basically means you need a majority controlling a majority of members that are in your own party. And then that majority of your party has to decide that you're probably the best person for the job. So there's a lot of activities that are involved. In being a politician and notice none of them that I really mentioned has to do with making laws that make life better based on the information that you have, or you learn like really making laws is so far down on the totem pole for most politicians. In fact, I would say virtually all politicians, not 100%, but damn near a hundred percent that politicians certainly on the federal level. Do not write any laws. Every law that's been introduced every law that you will see, every law you'll see multiple co-sponsors of bills for all of these things are written by special interest groups that are essentially put together by use of lobbyist money. And then they are provided to the politicians along with large donations and saying, Hey. You should really sponsor a bill that talks about building a new dam in our community because we're a power company and we'll be able to control that dam and generate a bunch of electricity. They don't say that part to the politicians, but they're saying, yeah, your community needs to build this new dam. Oh. And by the way, here's the legislation you can introduce, they'll kick things off to go down that path. One of the most famous clips of Nancy Pelosi was saying. We need to pass this bill so that we can find out what's in it. If that isn't telling, I don't know what it is, here's a politician literally telling the truth and saying, let's just get this thing done and voted for in pass. So it becomes a law and then we can find out what it actually does because she hasn't read it virtually. Nobody else has read it. And. Really in reality, almost no bills, certainly no bills that are in excess of a couple of pages are ever read by politicians. They all have staff. Their staff is in charge of reading these things. Their staff is in charge of making recommendations. Their staff is in charge of making any corrections or suggestions. They are way too busy trying to get themselves reelected to actually worry about the legislation that they're passing now. All of these things you could say, well, you're exaggerating and I'm sure maybe I am generalizing. I don't know if I'm exaggerating, but I may be generalizing here, but they're all based on reality. If you look at the way that government operates. Passing legislation is not the most typical activity that you will find the politician engaging in. Most of them engage in activities that you can directly tie to reelection and even the legislation they're working out or they're sponsoring that they're trying to push through. Is generally something that will favor their constituents over other people. Now that's not going to be 100%. I know that, but it is highly likely. And the entire problem that is caused by having politicians spending well in excess of 50% of their time in office doing things that are. Really focused on putting them in office. One more time can be eliminated. If you simply instill term limits. A politician that gets elected to a single term is a politician that will get the most work done because they don't have to get reelected. They don't have to worry about getting more money so that they have a war chest for their next selection. A politician that is in their one and only term. And really the argument for this can be seen by the second term of a president versus the first term in the first term, it's all about the show. It's about doing things to build your legacy and being impressive because doing those things will get people to reelect you for a second term. The second term is generally not as broad and broad in, out there it's not as impressive, but the second term is when they actually do more work because now they know they're not going to get reelected. So it's just a matter of what can be done to just make me. Seem like a gracious, good political figure that people can look back on fondly. And those things tend to coincide with. What's actually good for the people that elected that politician. So if the politician ran on a pro, let's say pro-abortion stance, then in that first term, they might make a big deal and talking about. How there why should we, I guess it wouldn't be pro-abortion, maybe it wouldn't be pro-abortion, but it would be certainly it would be things that make them seem like they really care about that particular topic, but nothing might actually happen because in reality, to get a bill passed for the president to sign, could take not just months, it could take literally years to get to that point, to have the right bill that both the. The house and the sun degree on, and then the president finally. Yes. So the second term of the president is when more useful things happen and a lot of people would call it the lame duck term and stuff, but it really isn't it's, there's a freedom that comes with not having to run again. There's a freedom that comes with not having to worry about being reelected. And that freedom is something that allows the. Well, it w we don't have that for Senator house. So we're just talking about the president here, but allows the president to do things that they actually. Wanted to bring the care about, but that are maybe a little less popular there. Maybe that maybe the stance is something that's been a strong desire that they've have, but the pollsters have told them this is not a top issue with the voters. Don't waste your time focusing on trying to push this through, because it's going to be a waste of your time. Well, in the second term, when they're no longer running well, now they can actually focus on doing those two things. But the president is also not the ideal example of what happens when you're not running, because typically that is the highest possible office that you can obtain. So as us president, so consequently, most presidents want to just. Chill and retire and do speaking gigs and book deals, or like some presidents have painted a, yeah. I'm looking at you, George Bush. W they want do things that they certainly couldn't do while they were in office. And now they've got enough notoriety that anytime you think you might need some more money, all you got to do is pick up the phone and call a. Call a book publisher or, probably a PR person really. And then they'll figure out how to negotiate stuff. Or yes. And the agent, the presidents have agents, I don't even know. I assume maybe they would so like a public figure who is no longer in office. Yeah. They probably do have agents, so they would have an agent negotiate, shade stuff for them, and then just, get a million dollar advance on that. Like Hillary did. The point being is that if you're not having to constantly be doing things that are going to maximize your chances of being reelected, then you can just focus on doing things that were, you were elected there to bring in. Now, let me play devil's advocate and say, well, aren't those the same? Don't people want to just reelect somebody that does the things that they promise the answer is hell no. How many years have the Democrats been running on the platform of of improving things for the working Americans? How many literally decades have the Democrats from the platform of. Improving things for black people, improving things for minorities, whatever phrase you want to use. It's literally been decades, probably been 70, 80 years that they've run on that. Now you would think if they were capable of improving things for black people or they were capable of improving things for the working man, Why would they have not done that? Well, the reason they wouldn't have done that is because it's convenient to always have something that you don't work from previous elections to repeat and do again the next time. And you see this on both sides. I don't want to just point at Democrats for doing this, but Republicans have done this a lot as well. They've done it with anti-abortion stuff. They've done it with well, certainly in previous years with anti-gay stuff. I don't want to really call it gay rights necessarily. Cause you know, we're creating rights that people already have. So I don't want to, I don't want to fall into that trap, but there's certainly been plenty of issues on the right taxes and other one. George Bush, the first George Bush presidency ended up. Being a failure or not being reelected because he had used that phrase, no new taxes. And he was promising something that clearly Republican voters, conservative voters wanted, which is to limit any kind of potential new taxes after the taxes have gone down during Ronald Reagan from outrageous taxes during Jimmy Carter. And then what did Bush end up doing? Well, he ended up. Actually signing legislation that increased taxes and doesn't matter why he did that. He I'm sure he had some good justification rationalization for doing that, but he had very vocally use that no new taxes line to get elected. And when he did something that was contrary to what he promised. The voters decided to not get him reelected. So he didn't stand by the voters and the voters didn't stand by him. And as a result, we actually ended up getting bill Clinton. We did raise taxes. So now not by a whole lot. Bill Clinton was by far probably one of the best Democrat presidents that we had in the past years. But nonetheless, instead of Bush getting reelected. We ended up flipping parties like that to Clinton. But if you look at almost every Republican candidate has also talked about taxes and it's like a standard Republican talking points, like minority or improving conditions for minorities as standard Democrat talking points. And yet these things, we've still had taxes go up now with Trump tax has actually went down. He was able to lower the tax rates under Biden, most unlikely, we're going to have an increase of taxes going back up. So it goes back and forth and it really sort of depends on where the priorities are for the person actually running. But the point is that there are certain promises, certain political tropes that just go on for years and years. And nobody simply stops to ask the simple question of well, you've been in politics for more than one or two terms, certainly in Congress. A lot of them have been there for five, six, seven, eight, nine terms. So how can you promise to fix something? Quote unquote. And the word fix is used also by both parties. That you couldn't fix for some reason in the first five, six times that you were in office, like what magically has changed that would allow you to fix it on your sixth or seventh time in office that you couldn't previously. Just that simple question. It just never gets asked neither by the media, nor are you really by voters. And so this kind of brings us back to the issue of, well, how does this perpetuate? Why is it that only 10% of all incumbents in federal office and up getting replaced? Why isn't it the higher number? Why isn't half while the reason is also very clear and obvious, but I don't think most people think about it. The reason is that in the United States, at least in elections, you're typically not voting for a particular candidate, you're voting for a party. And so the way that the U S system works is really a two party system where the parties are somewhat diametrically opposed? I say somewhat because they do move around. But typically whatever one party decides to move towards is what the other party starts moving away from. So they can be diametrically opposed at all times, even if they've sort of start shifting on what it is that they're opposing. And so given that you have generally two parties and since they are not two parties close to each other, we're not talking about the liberal Democrats versus the socialist Democrats were like you have in some European places, countries we're talking about conservatism versus liberalism, socialism versus again, concern doesn't, you're really talking about views that are very far apart. And while the majority of the population may not actually hold views that far apart from others all lately in the last few years, maybe they do. But generally the views of the population are more broad. They're spread around more than simply being a black and white yes. Or no, zero or one type of vote. But people gravitate towards the thing that's closest. To the views that they have. So if you have two people that are one to the left of center, one to the right of center, their views, they probably share the same view on 50% of the things in life. Maybe even 70% of the things in life, but then on other things they have. Views that differ. Well, they're going to get pulled further apart. If you simply compare who they're voting for instead of what their actual views are. And prior to the to the really at this point, complete acceptance of of gays in the Republican party, there's tons of them. But before that happened, There were people that would have to choose, well, do I want to vote for Republican principles that I believe in, or do I want to vote for Democrat? Because they support gay rights and it's those artificial choices that really ended up. And this is only true in a two party system, by the way. So if there were multiple parties, this would be a very different conversation, but with only two parties, you had to make these artificial wide choices. That ended up promoting a certain party rather than a certain person in that party. So having somebody that was this mythical unicorn. I vote the person running, not the party. So I might vote Democrat one time. I'll vote Republican the next time. And then I'll maybe I'll vote for a green candidate at the time after that. And then I'll vote for a libertarian and time after that, because I don't care what party they're in. I'm only looking at their specific personal stance. That is a unicorn. That is a myth. People didn't do that. They don't do that. They pick whatever is the strongest thing. That they're concerned about. And then side with either the Republicans or Democrats and that determines who they vote for. And all of that is essentially a preface to my next point, which is that the reason that 90% of incumbents stay in office is not because people voting for them are happy with the job they're doing. That's the lie that they would like to have everyone believe? Well, I get reelected because my constituents love me. They've elected me 14 times over the years. And that's why I've been in office, for the last 30 years. No, they don't like you quite often. There are problems with people, but given the choice between you. And a choice between somebody that's running on the opposite side of your views, they will keep reelecting you. So if you have somebody that has a strong pro second amendment bent they like gun rights. They think that's the most important part of the constitution. Then they will vote for the shittiest crappiest, Republican running. Because the Republican party supports the second amendment, even though this particular person that is running as a Republican from their side they can think they're complete trash. Like they don't do anything else that these people agree with, but if they don't vote for that person, then the Democrat candidate will win. And they know that the Democrat party is against guns. And so they would rather have the shitty crappy candidate from a party that they have an agreement with than to have somebody that could potentially be a much better politician, but is representing a party that doesn't agree with whatever their hot topic is. And this is the main issue that we see all over the country where people are not satisfied. If you look at the survey results, Of satisfaction numbers across the board with politicians there's virtually no politician that has an over 50% satisfaction. It's they're few and far between very few. Most politicians spend their entire term under 50% approval on their 50% satisfaction. And that number I'm not talking about the broad overall approval. I'm talking about approval within people of their own party. So what's the end result here is you have people that have politicians representing them, who they don't like, but they're afraid to vote for anybody other than that politician, because there's only two choices. There's the choice for this guy. Who's a crappy politician, but represents a party that has issues that represents me. And then there's the other guy who is. Represented by a party that has issues that I disagree with. So they're not really voting for the best candidate for the job they're voting for the party that is closest to them. And then the final piece of this puzzle is if you combine what I just described with the fact that the party is in charge of really Of determining who is going to be on the ballot. So yes, you do have. Primary elections, but remember primary elections are not a legal thing. There, you may go into the same voting location to vote for primary elections, but that is really just a courtesy that the local municipality is doing for the party. The, that is a purely party organized private event that is called the primary elections for the places that have them. Not every place has primaries either. But effectively what you're doing when you're running in the primary is you're just telling the party who a majority of people that see themselves as being in the party would like to see as a candidate and is extremely rare for a sitting candidates to not be chosen during a primary. Typically that candidate has to have done something horrible. Borderline enough to get him kicked out of the party for them to not be elected in the primary. Furthermore, the party can disregard the results of the primary, unless, some specific state parties might have it in their constitution to follow those resorts. But the whole concept of letting people pick who the party advances on to the next election. Is completely up to the party itself. It is not a first phase of elections as a lot of people think the primary is simply a popularity contest, like we used to have, I don't think these exists anymore. Maybe they do where you're watching some TV program and there's some contestants on there. Maybe some skill or dancing or something. And then you would call in and your phone to vote for who needs to move on to the next round. That's all that it's happening. It's like this isn't the primary elections are not real elections. They're just a way for you to convey to the party of that person, who you would like to see run. And the party then makes its determination and the party can absolutely choose to not have somebody be a member of the party. If they decide that's not something they're interested in we just sat in a event, happened in Nevada. I believe where. The Democrat party officials now I, man, I hope I get this right, because there's only two possibilities, so it's a 50, 50 chance, but I'm going off memory again here. I'm not looking it up, but what happened was that I believe that after the last set of elections were extremely. The left wing socialist candidates ended up getting elected in the primaries or maybe it was the actual not have to be about primaries. I can't imagine this happens any other way. So they must've just had a primary that the extremely woke candidates ended up winning in the primary. That people that were running the party up until that point had basically just thrown their hands up in the air and said, well, if you guys want this, you got it. And then they left the party. So essentially the centrist Democrats ended up walking away from the Democrat party because so many of the far left woke Democrats ended up winning in the primary. So now if I'm wrong on this, let me know. Because then it's probably the flip around of that case, but I'm pretty sure that's what I read. So the bottom line is because we have a two party system and because we don't have term limits. And because that creates a system where politicians main goal is to simply get reelected. One more time. We end up having politicians that are in the business of just generating money and power for themselves. And not really caring too much about what's good for society or what would happen if they were one termers and what I would propose, what I did propose back in high school. And I would do it again, is that we have term limits and the term limits for offices like the Senate, for example, would either be one or two term limits. I would love for it just to be a single six-year term. A one single six year term has plenty of time to get things done. But as a compromise, we could make it to terms 12 years. That's 12 years of a person's life. That's a huge amount of time. And then for the house, which are two year terms, I would say that three terms is plenty. So that's six years. So somebody could be in the house for that many years now. Perfect case scenario, something that no compromise, everything would be one term, one term president, one term Senator, one term house member. cause it literally frees people up from having to ever think about running again. It means they can walk in there and 100% of their time is spent on things related to the job at hand without how does this affect me getting voted for again? How does this effect my chance of reelection? If you take that away, you end up people being focused on the job at hand, rather than focused on. Whatever they need to do to keep their job, which is often contrary to what the needs of the actual people that elected them actually are. So hopefully I didn't clobber this too much. I know this is a bit of a longer episode long enough that I didn't get to any news items at all, but I just had a couple of conversations over the last couple of days. With people where this topic came up and I thought, I really need to just do a full episode talking about how a lot of the problems with us politics are really the result of not having term limits of having people be able to constantly run and run and run for office and effectively that their career is not even just being a politician. Their career is getting reelected. That's the main thing they do. And because people have turned politics into their careers, trying to get legislation passed through that imposes term limits. It's like pulling teeth. It's like asking somebody to set their own tax rates to be higher than what it is right now. They'll say, okay, I'll raise my rate by 1e-05%. They're happy. So you got what you wanted. I've raised my own tax rate. People do not want to limit themselves. And so getting them to pass legislation, which is going to limit them, probably isn't going to happen. I think my solution for this 30 years ago was that there's a 16 year delayed effect on this coming into play. So it, it really shouldn't affect anybody actually passing it. It'll affect people in the future that are coming in. But then I think that was the only way that I came up with this possibly ever working. And the fact that we still don't have term limits 30 years later kinda means that I think I was onto something. Politicians are not willing to do things that will affect their own lives negatively. And that's a human trait. It's understandable. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is. Anyway. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode. Take care.