I don’t think you truly understand of thin of a financial knife’s edge some of the poor walk. How do you plan to take nontrivial taxes out of someone barely scrapping by without devastating them financially?
Also,do you feel the unemployed shouldn’t vote? If not how do you intend to collect nontrivial income tax on nothing?
Stop right there.
Do you agree or disagree with me that it would be most conducive to progress to explain the meaning of the phrase?
If you agree, then why call me, sarcastically, a “liege,” for reminding you of the very thing you already agree with?
If you disagree, then why comply with my request at all?
I completely disagree that people who pay no taxes have no skin in the game. Say Bob pays $1000 in taxes, and Jim gets so many tax credits that he actually receives a check for $200 from the IRS. Now say the US govt needs $50 more next year. They can either take more from Bob next year, or give less to Jim next year (or a combination of the two). However, as far as Jim and Bob are concerned, they are both facing a potential of $50 less next year.
Keep the partisan shots to the politics and politicians and don’t start laying snide remarks on other posters of the SDMB.
[ /Moderating ]
Whether or not your assertions about who pays taxes or not is true (if someone could tell this earner of <$18,000 a year how to not pay any taxes, I’ll give you 1,000 dollars. Really, it’d be worth that much to me.), who said that income tax payers are the only citizens who deserve the vote?
Let’s not let anyone who isn’t employed vote. Sounds like good public policy to me!
ETA: as I read on, I see that fortunately other people picked up on this as well. Sorry for the repeat.
More pernicious than that; I think. It’s not that they don’t pay attention - they pay almost more attention to what the opposition is saying than what their own do. They even come armed with factoids and bullet points or pre-digested debate to oppose it !
Truth is, thanks to the rabid polarization strategy, the “low information voter” (a.k.a simple farmers, people of the land, the common clay of the West) will assume that whatever it is or how well structured, reasoned, cited and proven, if it comes from the Left it’s a damned lie. Not in small part because half the time, if it comes from the Right it actually *is - *but then it’s OK to lie, cheat and deceive when it’s for a good cause. Doesn’t Government do it with via the CIA ? So there. Right wingers the world over have spread the pervasive notion that not only are Machiavelian politics, übercynical ploys and “the end justifies the means” A-OK, but that people who *don’t *engage in them are weak and/or fools. Even the word “idealist” has become a derisive jibe.
From this, through the misleading assumption/assertion denounced in the article that both parties are the same and do the same things, to “we do it, therefore they must do it to”.
Thus, if an Other says it, it must be misdirection. And if it’s misdirection, then the opposite must be true, no matter if the observable facts belie this conclusion. The facts are stinkin’ liberal Commies anyhow 
In a world where the federal government is a spending/wealth redistribution machine, as opposed to what the Founders envisioned (an entity that would defend the borders, coin money, and deliver the mail, and not much else) – no, why should non-payers get a say in where (other people’s) money gets redistributed?
Shrink the government’s spending/redistribution role back to its historical/constitutional role – my answer might (or might not) be different.
I have to say, that’s a disturbing opinion. If your employer goes out of business through no fault of your own, you lose your vote until you can find another employer?
Suppose the company failed because of some government policy? Suppose you want to vote the bastards responsible for that policy, and therefore your loss of a job, out of office? Tough shit by your way of doing things.
Suppose I’m a legislator and I notice that, for whatever reasons, the employees of a certain industry tend to vote against my party? It’s then in my self interest to do what I can to hurt that industry and thus eliminate as many of those votes as I can by putting those employees out of work. You don’t see the problem with that?
Also, how do you define unemployed for your purposes? Do idle rich trust babies get to vote? They’re not employed.
Do retired people get to vote? Do politicians who are spending all of their time campaigning (and thus aren’t employed) get to vote?
Well, there is that pesky part about promoting the general welfare. Now, in my dictionary, “promote” is an active verb, it is an effort, energy is expended towards the goal of the general welfare. Otherwise, it might say “preserve” the general welfare.
Then, of course, there is the fact that we have improvised our way to a consumerist economy. Got my gripes about that, but it is what it is, and if the consumer has no money, there is no economy.
And finally, without some effort towards economic equality, what we are likely to end up with is a bunch of enclaves, er, “gated communities” surrounded by vast populations of surly peasants. The Founders were geniuses at ambiguity, but its hard to imagine that’s what they had in mind. At any rate, they never tweeted about it.
Why should non-voters have to obey laws they had no say in legislating?
Here’s their own words:
The poor are among the governed. The poor are in the class of all men. You would strip them of their American rights to have a voice in that consent.
Children have to obey the law. Children are not entitled to vote just because of that. Obeying the law is the threshold minimum condition for living in an ordered society.
So anyone who’s ever been unemployed is a child, not an adult man or woman.:dubious:
So is voting.
Nope. The point that proves the “non voters don’t have to obey the law” notion to be a red herring is that we already have (several actually) large classes of people who everyone agrees need to obey the law (children, aliens, felons), and everyone agrees do not thereby automatically enjoy the right to vote. Having one additional category (non-payers) is not, therefore, the stretch that the strawman argument attempted to portray it as.
So no ordered society existed in the United States until 1960?
Or in Victorian England?
Or in Rome?
The problem with the fallacy of equating the need to obey the law with the right to vote is that the concept of a universal rule of law predates by hundreds or thousands of years the absolutist version of universal suffrage (and as I noted, suffrage still is not truly, nor does anyone seriously argue it should be, universal as to all 300 million people living in the U.S. at any given moment).
Have we forgotten one of the founding principles of this country: No representation without taxation!
Huerta, why do you hate America so much?
Would you have liked to live as one of the disenfranchised in Victorian England ? Or in Rome ?
Huerta: I think you’ve painted yourself into a corner, and the best thing is to admit an error. While your point has some merit (an expansive federal government being well beyond the scope of what the founders envisioned), the cure you propose is worse than the disease. A large number of people simply cannot afford to pay income tax, and disenfranchising them will likely lead to literal riots in the streets. That does not serve the goal of created a “ordered” society.