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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, at 60 years, the median-aged Senator has about 40 years of working experience and (arguably) that many years of accumulated knowledge and expertise, as well as life experience and a sense of proportion that comes from having observed our nation's ebbs and flows over a longer period of time.

Granted, it's possible to be 60 years old, foolhardy, and out-of-touch -- just as it's possible to be 30 years old, whip-smart, and tuned in.

But in general, voters value experience, and you don't amass experience without aging.

I agree with you, though, about term limits. They're a good way to balance voters' desire for experienced candidates with the need to inject new blood from both sides of the aisle.

Unfortunately, if there's one thing American voters stupidly fall for beyond incumbents, it's nepotism, so if term limits were in place, I predict we'd see more family dynasties in Congress.

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To play the devil's advocate with you and GP, term limits can often mean that congresspeople will be perpetual novices. Governing can be complex especially when seated on various committees like foreign affairs, CBO, etc. Older congresspeople who have accumulated years of experience have seen things go right, go wrong, and have learned a great deal about governing.

I think in tech we can attest to how disruption does not always mean good and how move fast and break things can go wrong.

To be clear, I don't disagree entirely with the idea of term limits or age limits, I just think the counter arguments deserve a fair amount of weight.

A limit of two terms in the US senate would still allow for a total career of 12 years — 4 years more than any president.

A 3-term cap would give 18 years, two more than any two presidents combined.

That’s a long way from being a newbie.

And the senate is even already voted in on a rolling schedule, so even in the worse case, 66% of the senate would have more than 2 years experience, and half of those would have 4 years.

Term limits to me seem to be one of those obvious solutions that are almost impossible to fix after the creation of a government. How do you convince politicians to vote against their own self interest? Especially with term limits, where you would need 2/3s of them to do so.

> A 3-term cap would give 18 years, two more than any two presidents combined

Not if one of them is FDR.

Perhaps government should be made less complex.

While you're accomplishing that I would like water to be less wet, and the value of Pi to be set to three as well, please.

All proposals that I've ever seen to "simplify" government amount to abdicating large functions, usually justified by some ideology around "rugged individualism" or anarchism which are completely fatuous.

I'm a big fan of the idea of abolishing states, having a US national government and then county/city level governments. The states were created when it was infeasible to manage large amounts of territory due to the difficulty of communicating across long distances. That's no longer the case. We could cede some state powers to local governments and some to the federal level.

The idea would get pushback from those in smaller states who enjoy a disproportionate voice in national politics, but I feel that those voices don't deserve to be amplified over anyone else's just because they have a bunch of empty land backing them.

Another side to consider is that often said Senator has 40-years of experience being a senator (or similar), and ~0 years being and employee or business owner. I often feel (anecdotally) that many representatives have spent their entire lives in government such that they have never experienced what it's like to be in the private sector, and therefore can be tone deaf to issues that matter to me.

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