To: CowboyJay
I'm not sure I'd agree that government pensioners of any kind should be voting. My government pension was earned and I paid for my social security. I pay taxes on both of those as well as on my earned income and investment income. Last year I paid over 17K in taxes. How you can think that I don't deserve to vote is hard to understand. There are plenty of taxpayers receiving some income from social security or government pensions who are far from "on the dole" and they would not tolerate losing the right to vote. In fact no one now able to vote would tolerate losing that right.
What is not right is that someone who pays no taxes gets the same voting influence as those who pay significant amounts of tax. It would be much more fair if someone paying little or no tax got one vote and those paying more tax got something like 1 vote per $1000 of tax paid.
18 posted on
12/12/2011 8:25:38 AM PST by
Semper
To: Semper
"My government pension was earned"
No doubt. You've earned the right to a retirement. But, IMO anyone accepting a gov't pension (please try not to take this personally) should have to give up the right to vote. Nobody should be able to more-or-less vote themselves more money directly from the public till. That's how all democracies (even representative democracies) fail.
"I paid for my social security"
A common misconception. There is no trust fund that you paid into. What you paid was an additional payroll tax that paid for the retirement benefits your parents' generation received, along with funding all the other various government programs your generation, in general, kept voting for. The money you paid in was gone before you retired, and the people working today do not owe you SS or medical benefits any more than you owe them welfare entitlements (which is exactly what SS and medicare were from day one). If you want your FICA contributions back, take it back from your parents - assuming they're not deceased. They (and YOU) have already spent every last dime of it.
IMO, we can reform SS, medicare, and gov't pensions now, or they will go away sometime in the next decade when the economy collapses under their weight. And "how we got here" is very simple. We allowed people who don't produce anything to vote themselves pretty much directly into the pockets of those that do.
Getting very tired of the "it's not socialism when we do it GOP crowd.
21 posted on
12/12/2011 9:57:53 AM PST by
CowboyJay
(Lowest Common Denominator 2012 - because liberty was overrated)
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