No. Term limits have no bearing on the skill floor, only the skill ceiling. By capping employment at 8 years, you place a hard limit on how good your employees can become. However, removing that limit does not magically make all of your employees good. You are still responsible for choosing to employ competent employees. If, after 8 years, an employee is still not good at their job, you have the option to fire them. That American voters are currently not exercising the option to fire bad employees is its own problem, and not a problem that is reasonably solved by mandatory firings, because the underlying cause is still there and voters who are inclined to vote for bad employees will simply choose to employ new bad employees.

At that point, the blame lies with the electorate for choosing to re-elect somebody who has a proven track record of harming them. You can't realistically prevent people from making bad choices in a democracy, at some point the voters have to have accountability for who they choose to vote for. Restricting who they are allowed to vote for is liable to backfire if you're arbitrarily removing the best candidates from the pool, especially out of a misguided belief that term limits prevent elderly politicians from taking power (yet Trump was elected for his first term at 70, his second term at 78, and Biden for his first term at 78... because, allegedly, disqualifying 55-year-old Obama in 2016 was somehow meant to help prevent geriatric politicians from being in power).

Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.

I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.

> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?

People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.

They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect.

Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.

Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.

If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.

Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.

Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).

Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.

SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.

> They have three new or late-model vehicles.

Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.

Wrong.

In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.

You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.

No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).

Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.

But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO

People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.

No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.

An awful lot of young people are starting businesses. Look at all the people under 30 becoming billionaires. This just didn't happen when I was young.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...

Equity means equal results.

If you work harder than I, for the same pay, that is equitable but it isn't fair.