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Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Some of it soun

Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. The scariest things for me are the backing out of climate change accords and the opening up of additional shale/gas/etc resources. We really don't need to be heading in that direction, energy-wise.

rewrew 10y ago
Well, there are many truly crazy and stupid regulations already on the books, plus you could do this by simply empowering the Federal Oversight Committee (which does this anyway) to just do more removals. So that one actually has a relatively simple path to achieve it.
cyberferret 10y ago
That one popped out at me too - 1 in 2 out?? It's not like decluttering a house - these are the fundamental building blocks of society...
- andromeduck 10y ago
  Well I'm sure there's still a lot of opportunities to combine and simplify existing regulations. You wouldn't be able to do it forever but I don't think we'll run out this term.
- trav4225 10y ago
  No offense, but the overwhelming majority of them are not (IMO).
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Fair enough. But then shouldn't the process me "Lets sit down and look at these, and take out the ones that are just not applicable nowadays?". This tit-for-tat style bargaining usually just ends up with both sides compromising or making rash decisions which may end up with the baby being thrown out with the bath water...
    - finiter 10y ago
      >"Lets sit down and look at these, and take out the ones that are just not applicable nowadays?" That's corruption, or the Establishment, or something.
    - trav4225 10y ago
      That is indeed a danger, agreed.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of federal regulations but I seriously doubt that anyone posting here does either. Trump's policy is based on the idea (taken as a truism) that the majority of existing federal regulations are bad and should go away. That seems like a pretty bold statement for anyone to make that would be almost impossible to substantiate. If these statements were made by incredibly scholarly policy wonks who love nothing more than to learn about the government and think about how it could be improved, that'd be one thing (it'd still be a very suspect statement though). However, I can't imagine that this came from any place more scholarly than people assuming that none of this stuff could possibly exist for any good reason. If they want to get rid of specific regulations, they should just get rid of what regulations they think are unnecessary. The policy also assumes that any new regulation would be equally unnecessary. It would turn any attempt to add a regulation into a political battle to not only add the regulation, but also a political battle to get rid of two others. This could cause needed regulations to not get passed because some vested interest has the political power to defend the two preexisting regulations. So it neither helps necessary regulations get adopted, nor does it help to get rid of unnecessary regulations. Again, if they think there are so many pointless regulations, just get rid of them. No need to bundle everything together like this.
    - trav4225 10y ago
      Yup, agreed. Thanks for your thoughts.
- malz 10y ago
  For a "law and order" candidate it's also curious to propose removing laws. Of course, in his mind the necessary laws are those that constrain personal behavior (drugs, vice, abortion). The laws to repeal will be those that "cost jobs" by protecting worker safety, consumers, or the environment.
dharmon 10y ago
Who knows how many outdated regulations are still on the books? It seems the thing to do would be hire interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law. If this idea persisted for 50 years maybe they'd have to start repealing actual relevant regulations.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > It seems the thing to do would be higher interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law. Sure, but how many of those exist at a federal level? Those are often city, county and sometimes state regulations.
  - dharmon 10y ago
    That's the important question. If the answer is, "not that many", then this would probably lead to gridlock. Not the worst outcome, I guess.
    - mywittyname 10y ago
      Basically the continuation of the last six years of Congress.
      - trav4225 10y ago
        Congress was, in part, designed for gridlock.
      - nickff 10y ago
        The past few Congresses have done a good job of passing large numbers of resolutions, but the President has not been signing them into law.[1] It seems to me that the 'problem' (if you believe there should be more laws) is a disagreement between branches or obstinancy by the President. [1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics
gdulli 10y ago
> How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It's something that sounds simple and good to someone who not only isn't aware of the details of what it would mean in practice, but also isn't aware of their own inability to understand the details and nuance, or that there are details and nuance. It was a Dunning-Kruger election.
- ainot 10y ago
  > The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority High brow smack (condescension) like that and "basket of deplorables" are what America revolted against. If the liberal left was truly smart, why did they allow the president to run up more national debt than all presidents prior...combined?
  - pmarreck 10y ago
    Has it become that radical to suggest that smart, well-educated people may in fact see further into the consequences of things (particularly in their areas of expertise, but probably also peripherally), see more cognitive bias, have better critical-thinking skills, remember more mistakes from history, and all around make better long-term decisions? Why is that even offensive to anyone? Just because of someone's personal insecurity about not having a college degree in anything? I've worked around plenty of people without college degrees (4 year vet, USAF, enlisted), they have nothing to be insecure about... except for uninformed ideas about the world (IMHO). Is it the subtle "I got this" confident arrogance of the expert? If so, then how is that any worse than a confidence and arrogance NOT based on intelligence/education/experience? (i.e., dunning-kruger) If the liberal doctor says you have cancer and need an operation and the conservative mechanic says it's just soreness and to take two Advil, are you going to discount the doctor because he is liberal elite, or because he is full of himself and has terrible bedside manner? If merely getting a college education makes you more liberal (as can be seen in exit polling), does that mean that merely knowing/understanding more things has a liberal bias? Doesn't that mean knowledge itself has a liberal bias? Does that sound like a preposterous conclusion to you? Modus tollens, and all that (not that even using the language of logical discourse is valued at all). No wonder this "anti-intellectualism spring." Election as proxy-class-war and proxy-culture-war (not to mention proxy-gender-war), that much has been made clear. “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov (RIP)
elchief 10y ago
I suggested dropping a law for every new law on here a year or so back and it was surprisingly popular Here's the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9740748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9740748
- kbenson 10y ago
  Well, at least that's steady state. If you wanted to keep the current statutes you could make sure to fold them into the new law after reviewing them. That sounds like a same way to force review of older laws to some extent, if you accept that review of older laws won't result in endless arguing. At least there should be real information about the impact the prior law had, positive and negative.
nartsbtaa 10y ago
We should just throw out any regulations that don't spark joy.
- deadringerr 10y ago
  Okay, this was the first time I laughed today. Thank you.
b_emery 10y ago
California tried term limits. They didnt work. Turns out you need to have actual political skills to do politics.
- jayd16 10y ago
  It'll mean unelected officials and lobbyists hold all the clout.
- krapp 10y ago
  And yet if you ask most Americans what "actual political skills" are, they'll likely say venality, corruption and malice, which leads us to having elected a president primarily on the basis of his incompetence.
  - b_emery 10y ago
    Good point. Also, the cult of personality or celebrity. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as an ineffectual governor, demonstrated that you need more than just celebrity to get things done.
semiel 10y ago
> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. Canada has a variation on this law. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-4.5/page-1.html#h-1 http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-4.5/page-1.html#h-...
- burkaman 10y ago
  And this law actually started in British Columbia as "repeal 2 for every new regulation". It does seem like it could be useful as a short term policy, if Congress can't find any way to agree on directly repealing unnecessary regulations.
  - jjoonathan 10y ago
    Don't worry, if they can't make up their minds I'm sure plenty of bright, helpful, and well-dressed citizens will come out of the woodwork to advise them as to which regulations aren't needed anymore.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      The UK government actually tried this back in 2010 with a website. I think the top rated repeal suggestion was "end paid maternity leave", and eventually the website was quietly closed and never mentioned again.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > It does seem like it could be useful as a short term policy, if Congress can't find any way to agree on directly repealing unnecessary regulations. Regulations are issued by the executive branch, not Congress (repealing regulations is actually done by issuing regulations specifying the regulations to be repealed, so the process for repeal is the same.) Also, "a regulation" isn't a well-defined unit.
    - burkaman 10y ago
melling 10y ago
I guess you haven't been paying attention. Many people don't believe in Global Warming, or at the very least don't want to even slightly impact the economy. The Democrats weren't going to hold office forever, and neither will the Republicans. The best thing for everyone would be for market-based solutions that have clear advantages. Solar, wind, electric cars, nuclear, etc. Republicans, for example, will put solar on their homes and drive electric cars if there are obvious advantages.
- threeseed 10y ago
  Completely ignorant position. Market based solutions only work if the market is fair i.e. all players are subject to the same conditions. The problem is (a) fossil fuels have large subsidies all up/down the chain and (b) fossil fuels do not have a surcharge for their impact on the environment.
  - melling 10y ago
    Fossil fuels aren't going to get that surcharge under the Republicans. You have to play the hand you're dealt, or whine about it, telling everyone how ignorant they are. In another decade, when the Democrats take Presidency or the Senate, maybe you'll get some offsetting charges. Of course, we'll have lost a decade and the problem will be much worse, if no forward progress is made. Solar hasn't gotten cheap enough that some people really want it: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/las-vegas-utilities-really-dont-want-strip-go-solar/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/las-vegas-utilities-really-don...
    - threeseed 10y ago
      Ironic that you are complaining about me whining but in fact you are the one putting your hands up and saying "nothing we can do about the government, best to just leave it to the market". I am more optimistic that change is possible. There are still numerous opportunities for people to convince Republicans to start believing in climate change and making the energy market fair and equitable to allow renewable technologies to compete. Look at what is happening with solar panels when their subsidies are removed. It's not pretty.
noobermin 10y ago
There's a lot of room to wonder about his trustworthiness given his record as a businessman, but even in this document, he doesn't address campaign finance reform. Congressional term-limits just consolidate power in the moneyed elites--the problems is not just the politicians, it's who corrupted them. If anything, this is a document to passify those moneyed interests who, unlike say Sheldon Adelson, worry about a Trump presidency. Everything I've seen so far suggests Trump isn't what blue-collar voters ordered for.
- rurban 10y ago
  No. The problem are the corrupt selfserving politicians, and not the ones who corrupt them. And his program is not only term-limits. mostly going after the criminals and clean up the mess. They should be worried, and are already crying. Should be doable even with the press witchhunting him and later with the antiliberal nonsense he will come up to please his voter base.
- josho 10y ago
  Trump railed against the system that allowed politicians to be bought. It turns out his solution is to term limit congress. Sounds like treating a symptom not the root cause.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - postcarnival 10y ago
    so what, then let's offer solutions and try to get them enacted? why all the armchair bitching on this site as if everyone is an expert just because they write code? what he did is nothing short of monumental and he WANTS to help America. If everyone is so damn smart then get involved and suggest changes. It's not like he's a fucking robot that is going to sit back and count how many marble statues he has in his garden!
    - SMUx 10y ago
      I understand the sentiment but comments like this detract from the value of this community.
jamisteven 10y ago
Why is that scary? Do you know how many of these laws are absolutely useless in present day?
- yabatopia 10y ago
  No. Do you?
  - adamredwoods 10y ago
    Good question, I think it's here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/federal https://www.law.cornell.edu/federal
Houshalter 10y ago
It's not as crazy as it sounds. Studies show that Government has a "liberal bias". That even during Republican administrations, more liberal policies are passed than conservative ones: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/19/6532489/chart-policymaking-has-a-liberal-bias http://www.vox.com/2014/9/19/6532489/chart-policymaking-has-... The reason is because it's much much harder to repeal laws than to add new ones, so they tend to increase over time. Regulation bloats.
- douche 10y ago
  Like technical debt. We are long overdue for a good refactoring push.
  - uremog 10y ago
    And for all the jokes about testing in production, that's literally all we can do.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      Well if we had a sane government, we could try rolling out new policies to randomly selected regions and cities first. We could use prediction markets to predict the effects of policies before implementing them.
      - bzbarsky 10y ago
        To some extent we do this. For example, we rolled out "legal recreational marijuana" to a few states several years ago, then watched what happened. In this election we rolled it out to a few more states and will see what happens. Not random selection, of course, but better than nothing.
        chillacy 10y ago
        Good to know I live in one of the staging states, at least I get the beta features sooner.
darawk 10y ago
> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. IMO this is the best thing in there. The burden of complex legislation is incredible, and there are tens of thousands of pages that could be simplified and/or removed entirely. It'd be a very long time before we ran out of stuff to prune and the benefits of doing this would be enormous. It's hard to overstate the benefits of individuals being able to actually comprehend the legal areas in which they operate.
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  I agree that regulations should be simpler, but this sounds like a bad way to achieve that. Are "regulations" strictly countable? It sounds like trying to minimize the number of lines (or characters) in a code base. Fewer lines (or characters) doesn't mean it will be more readable.
  - trprog 10y ago
    It also sounds trivial to game. So we want to add new regulation A. We have removed regulation B and C. Purely by coincidence the new regulation A is roughly the same length as A, B and C combined. But its one regulation.
  - extortionist 10y ago
    It's a nebulous definition as far as I can tell. For what it's worth, I don't deal with these in any sort of legal capacity, but my day job does involve a lot of work with federal legislation and regulations--I'm just not entirely sure where legal terms might differ from my office's colloquial terms. You can view the text of proposed and implemented regulations in the Federal Register: https://www.federalregister.gov/ https://www.federalregister.gov/ particularly under the Proposed Rules and Rules listings. A rule will add to/amend/repeal some part of the Code of Federal Regulations. This can be anything from clarifying a few words or fixing drafting issues to implementing major regulatory changes. It doesn't seem clear to me what this proposal would impact--does a minor amendment to an existing paragraph require a repeal of existing regulations? Would it need to meet some threshold of increasing regulatory burden--how would that be determined? What if it decreased burden? You can look through daily issues and see that they tend to just be handling the daily business of the government. Today's includes changes to fishing zones (restoring access to an area that had been overfished a few years ago), adding more airworthiness checks to certain aircraft parts, reducing restrictions on certain tires for trailers, and adding restrictions against financial institutions processing transactions involving North Korea. Would each of those need to repeal two prior regulations to take effect? What would quantify a previous regulation? And would they all be able to?
mozumder 10y ago
I don't get the appeal of term limits on Congress. Why would you vote for an amateur politician instead of a professional career politician? Aren't career politicians better than amateur politicians? If a politician is doing a good job, why would you artificially limit their term? The branch of government with the highest approval rate is the Judicial branch, where Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life.
- stevesearer 10y ago
  The appeal is that it would make being a career politician impossible and that term-limited congress would therefore act out of interest for their constituents rather than themselves. But you're right that it would also prevent good politicians from staying. Another proposal which could have a similar effect would be to drastically increase the number of representatives so that each one represents a smaller number of people (say 50,000). Having many more reps would reduces the individual power and influence of any one rep in particular and could dissuade them from acting in their own best interest.
  - rsl7 10y ago
    Term limits mean just as people really figure out how it works and how to get things done, they're gone.
  - mikestew 10y ago
    The appeal is that it would make being a career politician impossible The assumption, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily wrong, is that "career politician" is undesirable. How about getting rid of "career software developers"? Get rid of those entrenched JavaScript devs that are only interested in feathering their own nests. "Career doctors"? The medical profession is really just a business, and it should be treated like one. Next time you break a limb, seek out an MBA instead. Point is, the more I've been involved in politics (including running for office) the more I realize that you're not just going to march in on the first day and get stuff done. Kind of like that first day with that new codebase, eh? Now, I don't know that one out to be "Congress critter for life", but you don't just waltz in an go "my constituents want $THIS" and expect it to just happen. So a little experience might go further than electing the "outsider" who isn't "beholden to special interests".
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
2-for-1 need not be a law, just executive guidance around what Trump will or will not veto. If it doesn't take two substantive--to him--pieces of regulation off the table for each one proposed, he'll send it back for more cutting.
- pbreit 10y ago
  Critics still can't get their head around "taking it seriously but not literally".
pnathan 10y ago
Some of these ideas are, I think, able to stand on their own merit. In particular, the revolving door has been identified in a bipartisan fashion to be a real problem. I defer to actual political experts to discuss the proposed solution and its nuances.
Delmania 10y ago
>- term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Terms limit worsen the revolving door, because the reps focus more on their next job than actually legislating. They become incredibly short term sighted. The real fix would be to outright ban gerrymandering and force the officials to have to represent a mixture of political views.
rocqua 10y ago
It's quite feasible, because it is very difficult to distinguish 'a regulation' from 'many regulations'. Sadly, that quickly leads to huge compendiums of regulations covering a lot rather than neatly organized reasonably scoped regulations.
nikatwork 10y ago
> for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated I'd read this more as a position and statement of intent than a concrete plan. The devil will be in the spirit of the execution, not the letter.
JKCalhoun 10y ago
> Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Term limits for State congressional representatives seems not to have accomplished that though: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/01/16/states-show-term-limits-wouldnt-work-for-congress http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/01/16/states-sho...
blablabla123 10y ago
>Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal >regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is >that considered feasible by any rational person? It might >sound great if you don't think too hard about it. I think that's the reason Trump becomes president of the US. It may sound ridiculous to you but he is 100% correct with that point. Everybody knows that there are too many government regulations, people across the whole political spectrum agree on that. And although I'm from Germany, I can tell you rules that can be removed. For instance rules that require you to own a gun in certain counties, there are other actually ridiculous rules. There are YouTube videos about that and as a matter of fact these rules are not enforced. We need to relax our constrained thinking to start modernizing outdated structures. It's sad that Donald Trump must do this job.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Nobody agrees on thet, except in the very narrow definition of everyone knowing at least one regulation they'd personally abolish (the lefty choosing marijuana, the right "all of them") I've investigated the same complaint for EU law and all you can find is bizarre propaganda making ridiculous claims in bad faith – they make the regs sound absurd, but you can find out the real purpose within half a minute of googling. Famous example: requiring Cucumbers (bananas etc.) to conform to a certain shape, including curvature for different quality grades. Reasoning: the retail industry wanted it (they couldn't agree on a common standard), it helps trade by establishing standard grades. It's also been repealed as a result of the populist pressure, but by then everyone had been using it and they just continued.
  - Dagwoodie 10y ago
    Nobody has ever promoted removing all regulations, not even Republicans.
    - finiter 10y ago
      Being that specific is harmful to parties. Better to just always say there are "too many" and stop there.
cmdrfred 10y ago
You can find enough to pass nearly 10 via the first hit on Google. http://www.freedomworks.org/content/19-ridiculous-federal-criminal-laws-and-regulations http://www.freedomworks.org/content/19-ridiculous-federal-cr...
analog31 10y ago
In my view, term limits will have no practical effect on the influence of money on politics, so long as the parties can preserve their control of congressional seats through gerrymandering. Money will always find a way to speak louder than voters, so long as voters are suppressed. I love my party, but in my district, my party's primary is the only election with a meaningful impact on anything. And my party has this district, in order to keep us from ever gaining a majority of our state's legislative caucus. To drain the swamp, restore democracy. Any effort to decrease voter participation is inherently corrupting. Make it easier to vote. Make sure everybody's vote is counted equally. Of course, "counted equally" should be a matter of debate. Get rid of gerrymandering. Get rid of the electoral college.
Taek 10y ago
That was one of the hardest things about this election. I really like some of Trump's policies and promises. And some of them are frightening. Frightening enough to make me want to steer clear, but the DNC did not put forward a candidate that made me feel any better. Calling for a Manhattan project to defeat encryption? Yikes. America lost this election long before November, I'm sure of that.
warlox 10y ago
Behind every regulation is a body. Or 3 of them.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
blintz 10y ago
Term limits won't do a damn thing to curtail lobbying. Lobbyists love having lots of fresh blood just looking to make a quick buck flooding the legislature. The limits create a constantly revolving legislature that is easier to manipulate and will in general do a poorer job. If he really cared, we'd see something on campaign finance reform; but alas, he doesn't actually want to get money out of politics.
- gozur88 10y ago
  On the other hand, people who can't run for reelection have no reason to spend all their time raising money.
  - ajoy39 10y ago
    they raise money for their party. Candidates who aren't up for reelection still spend a lot of time fundraising for members of their party.
necessity 10y ago
>How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. Very "rational" non-arguments. You must have thought hard about it to come up with those.
kilroy123 10y ago
I agree the ones trying to stop lobbyist are very good. However, I'm sick to my stomach about the Climate Change ones.
shams93 10y ago
Yeah its going to get intersting when California is constently 128-135*... during february
vacri 10y ago
> term limits on congress Wouldn't pass in a million years. Why would congress pass such a law against themselves? And as a constitutional amendment, it would require a 2/3rds majority.
- imron 10y ago
  Trump has made that a key part of his platform. He took that to the electorate and has been given a mandate - presidency, senate, house. Any Republican member of congress who goes against that is going against a core part of his platform. Many fervent Trump supporters, including a number of influential ones on social media have stated that any elected Republican that doesn't support Trump's platform will see a challenge from a pro-Trump candidate in the 2018 mid-terms. It will likely be the end of them if they don't go along with it. I can't imagine many Democratic voters will be happy if their representatives vote against an anti-corruption measure. Especially considering DNC corruptions and cronyism essentially cost them the election. Trump is the social media president. I'm confident he'll be able to get support for this from the electorate.
arzt 10y ago
The tariff stuff freaks me out - it's a total idealogical paradigm shift. Re the point of reducing regulation, Larry page actually recommended a variation of this to the president of South Korea to reduce legal complexity of its government: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/07/07/google-ceo-larry-page-knows-what-you-think-about-work/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/07... "Reducing complexity, in fact, was a theme throughout the talk. Page recounted how when he was trying to simplify things at Google, he suggested the company take all of its rules and regulations and keep them at an easy-to-digest 50 pages. He even suggested a similar idea to the president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye. "I said, 'Hey, why don't you just limit your laws and regulations to some set of pages? And when you add a page, you have to take one away.' She actually wrote this down. She's great."
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  Larry Page is not a pubic policy expert. He's a CS grad school drop out that got lucky. This is as stupid as having the president of South Korea say, "You should keep the code to Google to a page and half. It would make it easier to understand." Seriously, this makes no sense beyond claptrap. Why 50 pages? Why not 1? Why not 5 million? Why an arbitrary limit at all? The whole idea hinges on the idea that somehow this is obvious and an intrinsic good. It's not. It's not even a metric worth optimizing for, because it has zero concern about actual societal effects.
williamle8300 10y ago
I think the idea is that his stance is not introducing new federal laws. It probably could have been worded plainly instead of adding a conditional. Federal laws should be considered in their own right, not in comparison towards other federal laws.
farright 10y ago
And yet if the rule were "for every new javascript framework, 2 existing frameworks must be eliminated" HN would be cheering.
redler 10y ago
This is not unlike how an opposing party will criticize a bill based on its number of typed pages. The thump of a couple of inches of paper on a podium makes for great and reductive theater. It's likewise naïve to consider the number of regulations to be a direct barometer of the goodness or badness of regulation in general. Next we'll see the refactoring of existing regulations into smaller or larger components to affect their numerological residue. Wanton numerological regulation slashers should be wary of Chesterton's Fence[1]. On the scale of meaningfulness, this idea is somewhere between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and middle school kids playing with margins, spacing, and font size to satisfy a teacher's page-length requirement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
- adamgravitis 10y ago
  Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus
  - facetube 10y ago
    This scheme is vulnerable to the same sort of gerrymandering game we play with districts. It provides no definition or guideline on the size or shape of a (presumably atomic) regulation. It's a meaningless bullet point.
  - laughfactory 10y ago
    I agree. I hope that some version of this process is implemented and that it will change government from how it currently operates: adding layers of regulation upon layers, to a process with iteratively improves regulation--weeding out the out-dated, the irrelevant, the imprecise, the ineffective, and replacing it with improved, timely, precise, relevant, effective regulation. So we end up with a regulatory base which is more comprehendible, manageable, and relevant.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    While true - that should be a side effect of good policy and process, not some stupid 2-for-1 rule.
true_religion 10y ago
Sure, he'll pursue it and it'll fail. He only has 100 days to spend his political capital attempting this, along with everything else he's trying.
imtringued 10y ago
>for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. It's easy to game. Now every new regulation is as big as two old regulations.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
awqrre 10y ago
> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. Doesn't sound that ridiculous to me, we have to find a way to eliminate useless/ridiculous regulations because they just pile on...
walshemj 10y ago
You can see he has never held elected office Its going to require an amendment to the constitution (which takes decades) and from experience a newbie MP Congress man etc will need one entire cycle to get to grips with the system and become effective. Having inexperienced elected representatives just gives more power to the executive - which is not what I think Trump wanted.
- _pmf_ 10y ago
  One could argue that in the long run, this will lead to a simplification of the legislative process.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    And this is a good thing how? there are technical reforms that could be a good thing ie no unrelated amendments to motions (bills) which would stop pork being added to unrelated bills.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
When people leave Congress they invariably go into lobbying. Term limits has to have some small effect on increasing this because you'll necessarily cycle more people through Congress, and they'll know less. If we are to have lobbyists ( and I think we must ) then let us have knowledgeable ones. The Gingrich Revolution was founded on term limits, and yet here we are. "Additional shale/gas" makes no sense at least now because of market conditions. There's an untold huge level of zero-coupon debt hanging because of the last shale revolution. It does nothing to help use market discipline to wean us off hydrocarbons, but it might still be the "bridge fuel" even green people were touting ten years ago. Myself, I think there was epistemic closure against any hydrocarbon activity in the chattering classes a few years back. This will make the compromises necessary to navigate emerging alt. technology more difficult.
tssva 10y ago
Term limits are an awful idea. They limit my ability to vote for the candidate of my choice while providing no benefit. Term limits already exist for many political offices and in no case have they resulted in any tangible changes in political behavior.
hendubz 10y ago
As a non-American, this is possibly a stupid question but why are limited terms on congress a good thing? My assumption was that those who wish to progress in government can benefit from lengthier terms in the legistlative branch to gain experience. Doesn't imposing a limit (or at least one shorter than several election cycles more than the executive branch) reduce the amount of experience that one can gain before potentially looking to move on and up?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > As a non-American, this is possibly a stupid question but why are limited terms on congress a good thing? Term limits are one of those things that Americans always expect to be good before they are implemented, but never actually are more satisfied with the affected institution after they are implemented. They attack a boogeyman (the "career politician" that is supposedly worse than the neophyte politician) that many politicians attack at the start of their careers (and many later, trying to construct themsleves.as outsiders) so often that people have internalized the idea that experience is a negative trait in governing.
SpikeDad 10y ago
Rational? Just an excuse to eliminate logical and valid and societal positive regulations. Nobody is saying that the regulations will be from the same bill or law. We will exactly be heading in the wrong directions. One regulations for rich Republicans and remove 2 regulations protecting poor minorities.

rewrew 10y ago

Well, there are many truly crazy and stupid regulations already on the books, plus you could do this by simply empowering the Federal Oversight Committee (which does this anyway) to just do more removals. So that one actually has a relatively simple path to achieve it.

cyberferret 10y ago

That one popped out at me too - 1 in 2 out?? It's not like decluttering a house - these are the fundamental building blocks of society...

andromeduck 10y ago
Well I'm sure there's still a lot of opportunities to combine and simplify existing regulations. You wouldn't be able to do it forever but I don't think we'll run out this term.
trav4225 10y ago
No offense, but the overwhelming majority of them are not (IMO).
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Fair enough. But then shouldn't the process me "Lets sit down and look at these, and take out the ones that are just not applicable nowadays?". This tit-for-tat style bargaining usually just ends up with both sides compromising or making rash decisions which may end up with the baby being thrown out with the bath water...
  - finiter 10y ago
    >"Lets sit down and look at these, and take out the ones that are just not applicable nowadays?" That's corruption, or the Establishment, or something.
  - trav4225 10y ago
    That is indeed a danger, agreed.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of federal regulations but I seriously doubt that anyone posting here does either. Trump's policy is based on the idea (taken as a truism) that the majority of existing federal regulations are bad and should go away. That seems like a pretty bold statement for anyone to make that would be almost impossible to substantiate. If these statements were made by incredibly scholarly policy wonks who love nothing more than to learn about the government and think about how it could be improved, that'd be one thing (it'd still be a very suspect statement though). However, I can't imagine that this came from any place more scholarly than people assuming that none of this stuff could possibly exist for any good reason. If they want to get rid of specific regulations, they should just get rid of what regulations they think are unnecessary. The policy also assumes that any new regulation would be equally unnecessary. It would turn any attempt to add a regulation into a political battle to not only add the regulation, but also a political battle to get rid of two others. This could cause needed regulations to not get passed because some vested interest has the political power to defend the two preexisting regulations. So it neither helps necessary regulations get adopted, nor does it help to get rid of unnecessary regulations. Again, if they think there are so many pointless regulations, just get rid of them. No need to bundle everything together like this.
  - trav4225 10y ago
    Yup, agreed. Thanks for your thoughts.
malz 10y ago
For a "law and order" candidate it's also curious to propose removing laws. Of course, in his mind the necessary laws are those that constrain personal behavior (drugs, vice, abortion). The laws to repeal will be those that "cost jobs" by protecting worker safety, consumers, or the environment.

dharmon 10y ago

Who knows how many outdated regulations are still on the books? It seems the thing to do would be hire interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law. If this idea persisted for 50 years maybe they'd have to start repealing actual relevant regulations.

kbenson 10y ago
> It seems the thing to do would be higher interns to start scouring for every "A married woman shall not chop down a birchwood tree on the day of her wedding while wearing her bridal gown" style law. Sure, but how many of those exist at a federal level? Those are often city, county and sometimes state regulations.
- dharmon 10y ago
  That's the important question. If the answer is, "not that many", then this would probably lead to gridlock. Not the worst outcome, I guess.
  - mywittyname 10y ago
    Basically the continuation of the last six years of Congress.
    - trav4225 10y ago
      Congress was, in part, designed for gridlock.
    - nickff 10y ago
      The past few Congresses have done a good job of passing large numbers of resolutions, but the President has not been signing them into law.[1] It seems to me that the 'problem' (if you believe there should be more laws) is a disagreement between branches or obstinancy by the President. [1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics

gdulli 10y ago

> How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It's something that sounds simple and good to someone who not only isn't aware of the details of what it would mean in practice, but also isn't aware of their own inability to understand the details and nuance, or that there are details and nuance. It was a Dunning-Kruger election.

ainot 10y ago
> The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority High brow smack (condescension) like that and "basket of deplorables" are what America revolted against. If the liberal left was truly smart, why did they allow the president to run up more national debt than all presidents prior...combined?
- pmarreck 10y ago
  Has it become that radical to suggest that smart, well-educated people may in fact see further into the consequences of things (particularly in their areas of expertise, but probably also peripherally), see more cognitive bias, have better critical-thinking skills, remember more mistakes from history, and all around make better long-term decisions? Why is that even offensive to anyone? Just because of someone's personal insecurity about not having a college degree in anything? I've worked around plenty of people without college degrees (4 year vet, USAF, enlisted), they have nothing to be insecure about... except for uninformed ideas about the world (IMHO). Is it the subtle "I got this" confident arrogance of the expert? If so, then how is that any worse than a confidence and arrogance NOT based on intelligence/education/experience? (i.e., dunning-kruger) If the liberal doctor says you have cancer and need an operation and the conservative mechanic says it's just soreness and to take two Advil, are you going to discount the doctor because he is liberal elite, or because he is full of himself and has terrible bedside manner? If merely getting a college education makes you more liberal (as can be seen in exit polling), does that mean that merely knowing/understanding more things has a liberal bias? Doesn't that mean knowledge itself has a liberal bias? Does that sound like a preposterous conclusion to you? Modus tollens, and all that (not that even using the language of logical discourse is valued at all). No wonder this "anti-intellectualism spring." Election as proxy-class-war and proxy-culture-war (not to mention proxy-gender-war), that much has been made clear. “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov (RIP)

elchief 10y ago

I suggested dropping a law for every new law on here a year or so back and it was surprisingly popular Here's the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9740748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9740748

kbenson 10y ago
Well, at least that's steady state. If you wanted to keep the current statutes you could make sure to fold them into the new law after reviewing them. That sounds like a same way to force review of older laws to some extent, if you accept that review of older laws won't result in endless arguing. At least there should be real information about the impact the prior law had, positive and negative.

nartsbtaa 10y ago

We should just throw out any regulations that don't spark joy.

deadringerr 10y ago
Okay, this was the first time I laughed today. Thank you.

b_emery 10y ago

California tried term limits. They didnt work. Turns out you need to have actual political skills to do politics.

jayd16 10y ago
It'll mean unelected officials and lobbyists hold all the clout.
krapp 10y ago
And yet if you ask most Americans what "actual political skills" are, they'll likely say venality, corruption and malice, which leads us to having elected a president primarily on the basis of his incompetence.
- b_emery 10y ago
  Good point. Also, the cult of personality or celebrity. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as an ineffectual governor, demonstrated that you need more than just celebrity to get things done.

semiel 10y ago

> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. Canada has a variation on this law. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-4.5/page-1.html#h-1 http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-4.5/page-1.html#h-...

burkaman 10y ago
And this law actually started in British Columbia as "repeal 2 for every new regulation". It does seem like it could be useful as a short term policy, if Congress can't find any way to agree on directly repealing unnecessary regulations.
- jjoonathan 10y ago
  Don't worry, if they can't make up their minds I'm sure plenty of bright, helpful, and well-dressed citizens will come out of the woodwork to advise them as to which regulations aren't needed anymore.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The UK government actually tried this back in 2010 with a website. I think the top rated repeal suggestion was "end paid maternity leave", and eventually the website was quietly closed and never mentioned again.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > It does seem like it could be useful as a short term policy, if Congress can't find any way to agree on directly repealing unnecessary regulations. Regulations are issued by the executive branch, not Congress (repealing regulations is actually done by issuing regulations specifying the regulations to be repealed, so the process for repeal is the same.) Also, "a regulation" isn't a well-defined unit.
  - burkaman 10y ago

melling 10y ago

I guess you haven't been paying attention. Many people don't believe in Global Warming, or at the very least don't want to even slightly impact the economy. The Democrats weren't going to hold office forever, and neither will the Republicans. The best thing for everyone would be for market-based solutions that have clear advantages. Solar, wind, electric cars, nuclear, etc. Republicans, for example, will put solar on their homes and drive electric cars if there are obvious advantages.

threeseed 10y ago
Completely ignorant position. Market based solutions only work if the market is fair i.e. all players are subject to the same conditions. The problem is (a) fossil fuels have large subsidies all up/down the chain and (b) fossil fuels do not have a surcharge for their impact on the environment.
- melling 10y ago
  Fossil fuels aren't going to get that surcharge under the Republicans. You have to play the hand you're dealt, or whine about it, telling everyone how ignorant they are. In another decade, when the Democrats take Presidency or the Senate, maybe you'll get some offsetting charges. Of course, we'll have lost a decade and the problem will be much worse, if no forward progress is made. Solar hasn't gotten cheap enough that some people really want it: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/las-vegas-utilities-really-dont-want-strip-go-solar/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/las-vegas-utilities-really-don...
  - threeseed 10y ago
    Ironic that you are complaining about me whining but in fact you are the one putting your hands up and saying "nothing we can do about the government, best to just leave it to the market". I am more optimistic that change is possible. There are still numerous opportunities for people to convince Republicans to start believing in climate change and making the energy market fair and equitable to allow renewable technologies to compete. Look at what is happening with solar panels when their subsidies are removed. It's not pretty.

noobermin 10y ago

There's a lot of room to wonder about his trustworthiness given his record as a businessman, but even in this document, he doesn't address campaign finance reform. Congressional term-limits just consolidate power in the moneyed elites--the problems is not just the politicians, it's who corrupted them. If anything, this is a document to passify those moneyed interests who, unlike say Sheldon Adelson, worry about a Trump presidency. Everything I've seen so far suggests Trump isn't what blue-collar voters ordered for.

rurban 10y ago
No. The problem are the corrupt selfserving politicians, and not the ones who corrupt them. And his program is not only term-limits. mostly going after the criminals and clean up the mess. They should be worried, and are already crying. Should be doable even with the press witchhunting him and later with the antiliberal nonsense he will come up to please his voter base.
josho 10y ago
Trump railed against the system that allowed politicians to be bought. It turns out his solution is to term limit congress. Sounds like treating a symptom not the root cause.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- postcarnival 10y ago
  so what, then let's offer solutions and try to get them enacted? why all the armchair bitching on this site as if everyone is an expert just because they write code? what he did is nothing short of monumental and he WANTS to help America. If everyone is so damn smart then get involved and suggest changes. It's not like he's a fucking robot that is going to sit back and count how many marble statues he has in his garden!
  - SMUx 10y ago
    I understand the sentiment but comments like this detract from the value of this community.

jamisteven 10y ago

Why is that scary? Do you know how many of these laws are absolutely useless in present day?

yabatopia 10y ago
No. Do you?
- adamredwoods 10y ago
  Good question, I think it's here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/federal https://www.law.cornell.edu/federal

Houshalter 10y ago

It's not as crazy as it sounds. Studies show that Government has a "liberal bias". That even during Republican administrations, more liberal policies are passed than conservative ones: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/19/6532489/chart-policymaking-has-a-liberal-bias http://www.vox.com/2014/9/19/6532489/chart-policymaking-has-... The reason is because it's much much harder to repeal laws than to add new ones, so they tend to increase over time. Regulation bloats.

douche 10y ago
Like technical debt. We are long overdue for a good refactoring push.
- uremog 10y ago
  And for all the jokes about testing in production, that's literally all we can do.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Well if we had a sane government, we could try rolling out new policies to randomly selected regions and cities first. We could use prediction markets to predict the effects of policies before implementing them.
    - bzbarsky 10y ago
      To some extent we do this. For example, we rolled out "legal recreational marijuana" to a few states several years ago, then watched what happened. In this election we rolled it out to a few more states and will see what happens. Not random selection, of course, but better than nothing.
      - chillacy 10y ago
        Good to know I live in one of the staging states, at least I get the beta features sooner.

darawk 10y ago

> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. IMO this is the best thing in there. The burden of complex legislation is incredible, and there are tens of thousands of pages that could be simplified and/or removed entirely. It'd be a very long time before we ran out of stuff to prune and the benefits of doing this would be enormous. It's hard to overstate the benefits of individuals being able to actually comprehend the legal areas in which they operate.

tdaltonc 10y ago
I agree that regulations should be simpler, but this sounds like a bad way to achieve that. Are "regulations" strictly countable? It sounds like trying to minimize the number of lines (or characters) in a code base. Fewer lines (or characters) doesn't mean it will be more readable.
- trprog 10y ago
  It also sounds trivial to game. So we want to add new regulation A. We have removed regulation B and C. Purely by coincidence the new regulation A is roughly the same length as A, B and C combined. But its one regulation.
- extortionist 10y ago
  It's a nebulous definition as far as I can tell. For what it's worth, I don't deal with these in any sort of legal capacity, but my day job does involve a lot of work with federal legislation and regulations--I'm just not entirely sure where legal terms might differ from my office's colloquial terms. You can view the text of proposed and implemented regulations in the Federal Register: https://www.federalregister.gov/ https://www.federalregister.gov/ particularly under the Proposed Rules and Rules listings. A rule will add to/amend/repeal some part of the Code of Federal Regulations. This can be anything from clarifying a few words or fixing drafting issues to implementing major regulatory changes. It doesn't seem clear to me what this proposal would impact--does a minor amendment to an existing paragraph require a repeal of existing regulations? Would it need to meet some threshold of increasing regulatory burden--how would that be determined? What if it decreased burden? You can look through daily issues and see that they tend to just be handling the daily business of the government. Today's includes changes to fishing zones (restoring access to an area that had been overfished a few years ago), adding more airworthiness checks to certain aircraft parts, reducing restrictions on certain tires for trailers, and adding restrictions against financial institutions processing transactions involving North Korea. Would each of those need to repeal two prior regulations to take effect? What would quantify a previous regulation? And would they all be able to?

mozumder 10y ago

I don't get the appeal of term limits on Congress. Why would you vote for an amateur politician instead of a professional career politician? Aren't career politicians better than amateur politicians? If a politician is doing a good job, why would you artificially limit their term? The branch of government with the highest approval rate is the Judicial branch, where Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life.

stevesearer 10y ago
The appeal is that it would make being a career politician impossible and that term-limited congress would therefore act out of interest for their constituents rather than themselves. But you're right that it would also prevent good politicians from staying. Another proposal which could have a similar effect would be to drastically increase the number of representatives so that each one represents a smaller number of people (say 50,000). Having many more reps would reduces the individual power and influence of any one rep in particular and could dissuade them from acting in their own best interest.
- rsl7 10y ago
  Term limits mean just as people really figure out how it works and how to get things done, they're gone.
- mikestew 10y ago
  The appeal is that it would make being a career politician impossible The assumption, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily wrong, is that "career politician" is undesirable. How about getting rid of "career software developers"? Get rid of those entrenched JavaScript devs that are only interested in feathering their own nests. "Career doctors"? The medical profession is really just a business, and it should be treated like one. Next time you break a limb, seek out an MBA instead. Point is, the more I've been involved in politics (including running for office) the more I realize that you're not just going to march in on the first day and get stuff done. Kind of like that first day with that new codebase, eh? Now, I don't know that one out to be "Congress critter for life", but you don't just waltz in an go "my constituents want $THIS" and expect it to just happen. So a little experience might go further than electing the "outsider" who isn't "beholden to special interests".

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

2-for-1 need not be a law, just executive guidance around what Trump will or will not veto. If it doesn't take two substantive--to him--pieces of regulation off the table for each one proposed, he'll send it back for more cutting.

pbreit 10y ago
Critics still can't get their head around "taking it seriously but not literally".

pnathan 10y ago

Some of these ideas are, I think, able to stand on their own merit. In particular, the revolving door has been identified in a bipartisan fashion to be a real problem. I defer to actual political experts to discuss the proposed solution and its nuances.

Delmania 10y ago

>- term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Terms limit worsen the revolving door, because the reps focus more on their next job than actually legislating. They become incredibly short term sighted. The real fix would be to outright ban gerrymandering and force the officials to have to represent a mixture of political views.

rocqua 10y ago

It's quite feasible, because it is very difficult to distinguish 'a regulation' from 'many regulations'. Sadly, that quickly leads to huge compendiums of regulations covering a lot rather than neatly organized reasonably scoped regulations.

nikatwork 10y ago

> for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated I'd read this more as a position and statement of intent than a concrete plan. The devil will be in the spirit of the execution, not the letter.

JKCalhoun 10y ago

> Some of this sounds great - term limits on congress, a measure to reduce the revolving door effect of government officials going into lobbying. Term limits for State congressional representatives seems not to have accomplished that though: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/01/16/states-show-term-limits-wouldnt-work-for-congress http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/01/16/states-sho...

blablabla123 10y ago

>Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal >regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. How is >that considered feasible by any rational person? It might >sound great if you don't think too hard about it. I think that's the reason Trump becomes president of the US. It may sound ridiculous to you but he is 100% correct with that point. Everybody knows that there are too many government regulations, people across the whole political spectrum agree on that. And although I'm from Germany, I can tell you rules that can be removed. For instance rules that require you to own a gun in certain counties, there are other actually ridiculous rules. There are YouTube videos about that and as a matter of fact these rules are not enforced. We need to relax our constrained thinking to start modernizing outdated structures. It's sad that Donald Trump must do this job.

matt4077 10y ago
Nobody agrees on thet, except in the very narrow definition of everyone knowing at least one regulation they'd personally abolish (the lefty choosing marijuana, the right "all of them") I've investigated the same complaint for EU law and all you can find is bizarre propaganda making ridiculous claims in bad faith – they make the regs sound absurd, but you can find out the real purpose within half a minute of googling. Famous example: requiring Cucumbers (bananas etc.) to conform to a certain shape, including curvature for different quality grades. Reasoning: the retail industry wanted it (they couldn't agree on a common standard), it helps trade by establishing standard grades. It's also been repealed as a result of the populist pressure, but by then everyone had been using it and they just continued.
- Dagwoodie 10y ago
  Nobody has ever promoted removing all regulations, not even Republicans.
  - finiter 10y ago
    Being that specific is harmful to parties. Better to just always say there are "too many" and stop there.

cmdrfred 10y ago

You can find enough to pass nearly 10 via the first hit on Google. http://www.freedomworks.org/content/19-ridiculous-federal-criminal-laws-and-regulations http://www.freedomworks.org/content/19-ridiculous-federal-cr...

analog31 10y ago

In my view, term limits will have no practical effect on the influence of money on politics, so long as the parties can preserve their control of congressional seats through gerrymandering. Money will always find a way to speak louder than voters, so long as voters are suppressed. I love my party, but in my district, my party's primary is the only election with a meaningful impact on anything. And my party has this district, in order to keep us from ever gaining a majority of our state's legislative caucus. To drain the swamp, restore democracy. Any effort to decrease voter participation is inherently corrupting. Make it easier to vote. Make sure everybody's vote is counted equally. Of course, "counted equally" should be a matter of debate. Get rid of gerrymandering. Get rid of the electoral college.

Taek 10y ago

That was one of the hardest things about this election. I really like some of Trump's policies and promises. And some of them are frightening. Frightening enough to make me want to steer clear, but the DNC did not put forward a candidate that made me feel any better. Calling for a Manhattan project to defeat encryption? Yikes. America lost this election long before November, I'm sure of that.

warlox 10y ago

Behind every regulation is a body. Or 3 of them.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

blintz 10y ago

Term limits won't do a damn thing to curtail lobbying. Lobbyists love having lots of fresh blood just looking to make a quick buck flooding the legislature. The limits create a constantly revolving legislature that is easier to manipulate and will in general do a poorer job. If he really cared, we'd see something on campaign finance reform; but alas, he doesn't actually want to get money out of politics.

gozur88 10y ago
On the other hand, people who can't run for reelection have no reason to spend all their time raising money.
- ajoy39 10y ago
  they raise money for their party. Candidates who aren't up for reelection still spend a lot of time fundraising for members of their party.

necessity 10y ago

>How is that considered feasible by any rational person? It might sound great if you don't think too hard about it. Very "rational" non-arguments. You must have thought hard about it to come up with those.

kilroy123 10y ago

I agree the ones trying to stop lobbyist are very good. However, I'm sick to my stomach about the Climate Change ones.

shams93 10y ago

Yeah its going to get intersting when California is constently 128-135*... during february

vacri 10y ago

> term limits on congress Wouldn't pass in a million years. Why would congress pass such a law against themselves? And as a constitutional amendment, it would require a 2/3rds majority.

imron 10y ago
Trump has made that a key part of his platform. He took that to the electorate and has been given a mandate - presidency, senate, house. Any Republican member of congress who goes against that is going against a core part of his platform. Many fervent Trump supporters, including a number of influential ones on social media have stated that any elected Republican that doesn't support Trump's platform will see a challenge from a pro-Trump candidate in the 2018 mid-terms. It will likely be the end of them if they don't go along with it. I can't imagine many Democratic voters will be happy if their representatives vote against an anti-corruption measure. Especially considering DNC corruptions and cronyism essentially cost them the election. Trump is the social media president. I'm confident he'll be able to get support for this from the electorate.

arzt 10y ago

The tariff stuff freaks me out - it's a total idealogical paradigm shift. Re the point of reducing regulation, Larry page actually recommended a variation of this to the president of South Korea to reduce legal complexity of its government: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/07/07/google-ceo-larry-page-knows-what-you-think-about-work/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/07... "Reducing complexity, in fact, was a theme throughout the talk. Page recounted how when he was trying to simplify things at Google, he suggested the company take all of its rules and regulations and keep them at an easy-to-digest 50 pages. He even suggested a similar idea to the president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye. "I said, 'Hey, why don't you just limit your laws and regulations to some set of pages? And when you add a page, you have to take one away.' She actually wrote this down. She's great."

jonathankoren 10y ago
Larry Page is not a pubic policy expert. He's a CS grad school drop out that got lucky. This is as stupid as having the president of South Korea say, "You should keep the code to Google to a page and half. It would make it easier to understand." Seriously, this makes no sense beyond claptrap. Why 50 pages? Why not 1? Why not 5 million? Why an arbitrary limit at all? The whole idea hinges on the idea that somehow this is obvious and an intrinsic good. It's not. It's not even a metric worth optimizing for, because it has zero concern about actual societal effects.

williamle8300 10y ago

I think the idea is that his stance is not introducing new federal laws. It probably could have been worded plainly instead of adding a conditional. Federal laws should be considered in their own right, not in comparison towards other federal laws.

farright 10y ago

And yet if the rule were "for every new javascript framework, 2 existing frameworks must be eliminated" HN would be cheering.

redler 10y ago

This is not unlike how an opposing party will criticize a bill based on its number of typed pages. The thump of a couple of inches of paper on a podium makes for great and reductive theater. It's likewise naïve to consider the number of regulations to be a direct barometer of the goodness or badness of regulation in general. Next we'll see the refactoring of existing regulations into smaller or larger components to affect their numerological residue. Wanton numerological regulation slashers should be wary of Chesterton's Fence[1]. On the scale of meaningfulness, this idea is somewhere between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and middle school kids playing with margins, spacing, and font size to satisfy a teacher's page-length requirement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

adamgravitis 10y ago
Reducing the number, length and complexity of regulation is a valid goal, and that hasn't changed in thousands of years: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government." - Tacitus
- facetube 10y ago
  This scheme is vulnerable to the same sort of gerrymandering game we play with districts. It provides no definition or guideline on the size or shape of a (presumably atomic) regulation. It's a meaningless bullet point.
- laughfactory 10y ago
  I agree. I hope that some version of this process is implemented and that it will change government from how it currently operates: adding layers of regulation upon layers, to a process with iteratively improves regulation--weeding out the out-dated, the irrelevant, the imprecise, the ineffective, and replacing it with improved, timely, precise, relevant, effective regulation. So we end up with a regulatory base which is more comprehendible, manageable, and relevant.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  While true - that should be a side effect of good policy and process, not some stupid 2-for-1 rule.

true_religion 10y ago

Sure, he'll pursue it and it'll fail. He only has 100 days to spend his political capital attempting this, along with everything else he's trying.

imtringued 10y ago

>for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. It's easy to game. Now every new regulation is as big as two old regulations.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

awqrre 10y ago

> Some of it sounds ridiculous - for every new federal regulation, 2 existing regulations must be eliminated. Doesn't sound that ridiculous to me, we have to find a way to eliminate useless/ridiculous regulations because they just pile on...

walshemj 10y ago

You can see he has never held elected office Its going to require an amendment to the constitution (which takes decades) and from experience a newbie MP Congress man etc will need one entire cycle to get to grips with the system and become effective. Having inexperienced elected representatives just gives more power to the executive - which is not what I think Trump wanted.

_pmf_ 10y ago
One could argue that in the long run, this will lead to a simplification of the legislative process.
- walshemj 10y ago
  And this is a good thing how? there are technical reforms that could be a good thing ie no unrelated amendments to motions (bills) which would stop pork being added to unrelated bills.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

When people leave Congress they invariably go into lobbying. Term limits has to have some small effect on increasing this because you'll necessarily cycle more people through Congress, and they'll know less. If we are to have lobbyists ( and I think we must ) then let us have knowledgeable ones. The Gingrich Revolution was founded on term limits, and yet here we are. "Additional shale/gas" makes no sense at least now because of market conditions. There's an untold huge level of zero-coupon debt hanging because of the last shale revolution. It does nothing to help use market discipline to wean us off hydrocarbons, but it might still be the "bridge fuel" even green people were touting ten years ago. Myself, I think there was epistemic closure against any hydrocarbon activity in the chattering classes a few years back. This will make the compromises necessary to navigate emerging alt. technology more difficult.

tssva 10y ago

Term limits are an awful idea. They limit my ability to vote for the candidate of my choice while providing no benefit. Term limits already exist for many political offices and in no case have they resulted in any tangible changes in political behavior.

hendubz 10y ago

As a non-American, this is possibly a stupid question but why are limited terms on congress a good thing? My assumption was that those who wish to progress in government can benefit from lengthier terms in the legistlative branch to gain experience. Doesn't imposing a limit (or at least one shorter than several election cycles more than the executive branch) reduce the amount of experience that one can gain before potentially looking to move on and up?

dragonwriter 10y ago
> As a non-American, this is possibly a stupid question but why are limited terms on congress a good thing? Term limits are one of those things that Americans always expect to be good before they are implemented, but never actually are more satisfied with the affected institution after they are implemented. They attack a boogeyman (the "career politician" that is supposedly worse than the neophyte politician) that many politicians attack at the start of their careers (and many later, trying to construct themsleves.as outsiders) so often that people have internalized the idea that experience is a negative trait in governing.

SpikeDad 10y ago

Rational? Just an excuse to eliminate logical and valid and societal positive regulations. Nobody is saying that the regulations will be from the same bill or law. We will exactly be heading in the wrong directions. One regulations for rich Republicans and remove 2 regulations protecting poor minorities.