On what is deliberately not here

First, term limits, which I weighed for a long while and set aside.

Between two-thirds and five-sixths of Americans want them.²⁷ They would pass my one test without difficulty. Leaving them out costs me something, and I know it.

I set them aside because they would worsen the very thing I am trying to cure. Deals are closed between people who expect to meet again next session, and the session after that; trust is nothing more than the accumulated record of previous dealings. Term limits cut that record short and end every career in a final term with nothing left to trade. One would be attacking the deal-closing problem by abolishing the conditions under which deals are struck.

The fifteen states that have tried it discovered something further. The knowledge does not vanish when the legislators do. It migrates, to the lobbyists and the permanent staff, who remain. A first-term representative seated across from a man who has worked that committee for twenty years is outmatched before he opens his mouth.

But the plainest reason is this. A term limit is a workaround for an election that does not work. It is what a people reach for when they cannot rid themselves of a man by ordinary means, and the reason they cannot is that his district was drawn safe and his primary was closed to them. I propose to repair both directly. Do that, and no artificial limit on service is needed, because the genuine article is restored: voters who may end a career whenever they choose to. Fail to do it, and a term limit will not save you either.

Second, the student-debt problem, which I have addressed elsewhere and deliberately do not fold into the repairs. It deserves its own treatment as a separate reform, with its own bargain between borrowers and the institutions that priced them, rather than a paragraph inside retirement policy.

And then the subjects I have deliberately let alone. Health care. Housing. Schools. Climate. Artificial intelligence.

Their absence is not an oversight. Several of them matter more than anything I have written. Health care is a system in which nearly every participant’s incentives point away from health. Housing is, I think, straightforwardly a supply problem that a functioning political system could address and a broken one cannot. And on artificial intelligence I hold the least confidence of all: it is entirely possible that it will not wait for us to put our house in order, and if that is true then the sequencing I am proposing is a mistake.

But I keep arriving at the same place. We do not solve any of them with a government that cannot pass a budget on time, cannot stop its own members from trading on their oversight work, and cannot close a deal that three-quarters of the country already wants.

Fix the instrument. Then the hard arguments can be had honestly, and the answers will survive the next election.