Congressional Maximum Age: Mandatory Retirement From Politics in the USA
There's something clever we can do here.
Have you ever noticed how old and dusty the people in Congress are? Were you also disgusted by the way Dianne Feinstein’s handlers puppeteered her barely breathing body into Congress and raised her fossilized hand up for her? How can we make sure that never happens again?
I have an idea that will extend the health-span of all Americans while incentivizing Congress to take care of their constituents. The idea is very simple: peg the mandatory retirement age to the median life expectancy of the median American. This could look like (lifespan - 10 years) if you think 79 is too high, or something else I haven’t thought of. The important thing is that the numbers be linked somehow.
Let’s see a chart that shows where we are on life expectancy compared to other economies. Oh dear… we consistently fall several years behind compared to other developed countries.
What we need is a way to incentivize our people’s representatives to raise that number, while simultaneously being a check on they themselves becoming too old to properly carry out their constituent’s wishes (such as the sordid case of Feinstein). Tying mandatory congressional retirement to median lifespan would help every person in the country live longer. Congressmen and women are demonstrably power-hungry, and with these numbers aligned it would work to drive life expectancy numbers up.
Would this actually work? I can’t be certain because I don’t run the zoo. Also, congress might be so power-hungry that they’d never pass a bill that limited their power under any circumstances (even if it would be a net positive for these United States).