Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
This is always the key conservative word thrown around. They didn't earn their money, they didnt earn this and that. Define earn. Did manual labor? Because then illegal immigrants do most of the earning in this country but for some reason you dont want them to vote. Are we including white collar jobs and management? Well, what about the bank and insurance CEOs who got billions of dollars of bonuses, did they earn that money, are you going to take away their vote? Or what about the speculators and manipulators on wall street who simply micro manage buying and selling with a computer doing a thousand transactions a second, making a lot of money that way from the comfort of their house, did they earn that money simply by buying up oil stock and then spreading the rumor that oil is going to disappear in ten years? Are you going to take away their vote? Oh no, because that money didnt come from the government, which automatically means it had to be earned since any money gained from the free market is earned money, oh most definitely.

See CR, this is where I get annoyed. If you want to suggest an idea on making everyone who actually earned their money being the only ones who can vote, then do that and include the CEOs and speculators who pushed the market and the law to the limit. If you want to suggest an idea that simply punishes the poor and promotes the idea that everyone who gets more from the gov then they give is lazy then do that. Don't suggest the latter under the guise of the former.
Well, as CR notes somewhere in one of his responses, he was not saying someone had to earn money to vote, simply that they had to receive equal to or less from the government than they earned.

The point is NOT to castigate those receiving government funding as "lazy," but to disallow the vote to those with a demonstratable personal interest in government payouts as it would make it too easy for some political party/coalition to buy votes and retain power. I suspect that CR is hoping that self interest would cause those on the dole to try to get off that dole so as to be able to exercise the suffrage. The U.S. Constitution, in its current form, does not allow voting for federal office to be limited in this fashion.

You also seem to be "under-whelmed" by the means many individuals choose to seek wealth in a service/financial economy. I have a belief in the value of capitalism and the market (albeit regulated to minimize fraud) as the best available adjudicator of who "wins" and "loses." I do not believe that it would be hard to functionally define income for this suffrage approach. You can certainly disagree with it on a "rights" level, but we've had a large arm of government (the IRS) defining income for some time.