Real Life Experience

TheFundamentals describes real life experience (RLE) as activity meeting the following criteria: Employment in the private sector where your paycheck is subject to termination for either no reason, market forces beyond your control or your failure and screw-up’s. It does not include any time spent on any government payroll or any time spent in any form of education. Most humans have a lot of RLE. Do our political leaders? That is the question we are trying to answer. Please observe the following compilation of the 12 current political leaders of the USGovernment. They are listed by name, birth date, current age, and TheFundamentals review of their real life experience as defined above. The RLE default was 5 years. Each person started with 5 years RLE. If you add up the RLE for these 12 current political leaders, all members of the party in power, you attain a grand total of 90 years of RLE which, when divided by the 12 individuals, averages to 7.5 years per person and that’s probably a bit high because of TheFundamentals generosity in setting the default standard.

Henry A. Waxman – 9/12/1939 - 69 y.o.; RLE – 5 years

Charles B. Rangel - 6/11/1930 - 79 y.o.; RLE – 5 years

Nancy Patricia D’Alessandro Pelosi – 3/26/1940 - 69 y.o.; RLE – 5 years

Christopher J. Dodd - 5/27/1944 - 65 y.o.; RLE – RLE – 10 years

Edward M. Kennedy - 2/22/1932 - 77 y.o.; RLE - 5 years

Richard J. Durbin - 11/21/1944 – 64 y.o.; RLE – 10 years

Harry M. Reid - 11/2/1939 – 69 y.o.; RLE - 5 years

Barnett Frank - 3/31/1940 – 69 y.o.; RLE - 5 years

Barrack H. Obama – 8/4/1961 – 48 y.o.; RLE – 12 years

Joseph R. Biden – 11/20/1942 – 66 y.o.; RLE – 13 years

Steny H. Hoyer - 6/14/1939 – 70 y.o.; RLE – 5 years

James E. Clyburn – 7/21/1940 – 70 y.o.; RLE – 10 years

On November 2, 2010, it may make some sense for taxpaying Americans to ask that the candidates seeking their vote to have a minimum of 10 years of Real Life Experience. It is not possible to make better decisions when the richness of your life experience includes all or virtually all experience in a non competitive, non market based, non performance based environment! Taxpayers have the right to insist that their candidates have RLE. This means someone who does go or has gone to work at a real job. It is up to the taxpaying voters to enforce this requirement. Unfortunately, the founding fathers assumed that citizens seeking the privilege of elected office would have real life experience from real jobs and professions.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” This is a current quote from John Conyers, whose name should be added to the above list. He chairs the House judiciary committee. Here are his statistics: Born 5/16/1929 – 80 y.o; RLE – 12 years. He has been in congress for 44 years! He doesn’t read the proposed legislation. Duh. If a novelist wrote this type of fiction, editors would reject it as begging credibility.