[noelchurchill]

I imagine ex-bureaucrats are useful to hire because of all the connections they made while in office. If there are term limits and the churn rate is high, that doesn't leave much time to build those connections while in office, or to keep them after they've left.

[jbooth]

There's already a revolving door between K-street and Congress, so hugh3's point is valid. Yours is too, I guess.

I think some setup that turns politician into a job that you do in between real jobs instead of a career in itself would be ideal, I just don't have any ideas that would necessarily work. Term limits do work with Presidents and seem to help with Mayors in a lot of cities (if you think city machines are bad now, non-term-limited mayors would make them worse).

[pyre]

Well, there are only so many positions that corps paying for government officials can give away. If there were terms limits and a high churn rate, eventually the market would be saturated. They can't hired all the Senators that voted for their bills.

[jbooth]

Hey, I really want to be on your side in this argument, but that number of positions is certainly greater than 535, right? More of those than there are elected federal positions.

[pyre]

The 535 number only counts one 'round' of Congress-critters. Let's assume the max term is 2 years, and all Congress-critters are in lock-step on their terms. So 535 leave Capital Hill, and enter industry and a new wave of 535 enter Congress. In 2 years, when it's time for them to leave (and enter industry), industry now has a workforce of 1070 ex-Congress-people (assuming that all of them enter industry). That number will continue to grow unless the industry positions after leaving office are capped (and the greater the cap, the greater the market saturation on these industry positions are). If that's the case, then those industry positions are consequentially less valuable.