Should old people be allowed to vote?

I chatted with a 75-year-old man here in Massachusetts and listened as he sang the praises of Big Government and deficit spending. In his opinion, the government’s massive borrowing saved our economy because surely we would have fallen into another Great Depression otherwise. He thought that the crisis was over and the economy was in good shape now. How then did he feel about the government’s plans to borrow another nearly $10 trillion over the next ten years (graph)? He loved that too.

Did he have grandchildren? No.

So basically he had benefited from the Reagan tax cuts and extra helpings of government services for the last 30 years but wouldn’t live long enough to get hit with the new taxes necessary to repay the debt. He was protected on the Massachusetts Turnpike by state troopers earning an average of $150,000 per year (plus another $150,000 or so in pension and other benefits). He is getting back far more than he paid into Social Security. He is getting unlimited government-paid health care in the world’s most expensive hospitals (Medicare). All to be paid for one day by people who are currently children and denied the right to vote.

Now that the federal government’s biggest expenses are “entitlements” for old people and most of the money is coming from future generations, does it make sense to allow old people to vote in federal elections? As government workers and contractors are also allowed to vote, what opposition to federal government expansion could possibly prevail at the ballot box?

17 thoughts on “Should old people be allowed to vote?

  1. The founders foresaw this problem, which broadly speaking is that those who obtain their livelihood from the government will always be motivated to vote to loot it. They dealt with the problem by denying the vote to residents of the nation’s capitol, under the assumption that the only dependents there would ever be would be employees of the government, and that they would reside in the capitol. Didn’t quite turn out that way.

    I agree with you, and would go further to say that anyone employee or entitlement recipient ought to lose the right to vote in federal elections. Good luck ever seeing that implemented though.

  2. One could make a very compelling argument that only net tax payers should be allowed to vote. After all, they’re the ones paying for the government.

    Unfortunately, right now that group is too small to ever get that law passed. There are too many voters like your older friend.

  3. I remember a story, something about four wolves and one sheep having a democratic vote about what to have for dinner.

    Go after the 150K/year troopers and overpaid medical companies. Leave the old guy alone. When he joined the workforce 55 years ago, someone told him employment would be for life and the company would pay his pension.

  4. What exactly is a net tax payer? A welfare recipient is presumably a tax-eater. But what if you’re living on Social Security—but haven’t consumed more than you paid in (plus some reasonable rate of return) over your working life? What about government employees? How about people who work for federal contractors?

    It’s a neat idea, but even the definition of a “net tax payer” is a bit slippery.

  5. A) federal elections should not be left at all to the popular vote (or electoral college)
    B) but if we have to, the 22 year olds who are still on their parents 1040 shouldn’t get a vote. If you aren’t independent, you aren’t old enough.
    c) If you think the oldies are protecting their SS and Medicare, what about the middle agers who are voting now thinking ahead 10-15 years? They certainly are a fatter portion of the voting bell curve…

  6. Well Phil,

    Seems to be a pretty good idea. Democracies around the world had implemented similar systems:

    In most parts of Germany (Prussia) one had the “Prussian three classes electoral law” which classified the voters into three groups according to locality (heritage) and tax payment. People who received public money were not entitled to vote. Of course women were not allowed to vote at all.
    There were furthermore overly complicated restrictions which made this system totally unfair failure. (It would have granted Bill Gaites like one third of the voting shares in his home state.)

    But the underlying logic, that only the active contributors to society should be allowed to vote has it’s traits right down to the roots of democracy and should be reestablished.

    How can we reach that?

    yours Martin

  7. How about this?

    Income tax becomes optional (keep property tax) — you get one vote for every dollar of income tax you choose to pay.

  8. I doubt that future generations will ever pay off this debt – future generations of taxpayers, anyway. One way or another (probably inflation), the creditors will probably be left holding the bag, on the assumption that future voters will be as self-interested as your 75 year old, and that people who stand to lose money by paying it back will outnumber those who stand to get paid back.

  9. OMG, if it wasn’t for the part about having no grandchildren, I would have sworn you spoke with my ex-father-in-law. He retired when he was 55, as an exec from a financial information firm – because “he didn’t want to work anymore.” Even back then I told him he didn’t have enough in his retirement funds to last the rest of his lifetime. He said, “that’s what the government is there for.”

    A couple of years ago (then 75) he was going on about Big Government and Social Security. I told him that by this point he used far more s.s. benefits than he had contributed. He was smug and didn’t care. I asked him how he reconciles his attitude when it comes down to how all this debt it will affect his grandchildren. He said he has, “full faith the government will take care of it.”

    I just hope this mindset isn’t pervasive for that age group.

  10. We had it at one point in the U.S. so that only land-owners could vote (With similar arguments as to why voting rights ought to be that way). Problem is, they tended to perpetuate the interest of land-owners making it more and more difficult for the poor to have any hope of ever becoming land-owners themselves.

    I fail to see how this won’t just happen again except we’re replacing land-owners with high-tax payers, ever perpetuating their own interests and forsaking others. How many people would altruistically vote to take resources from their own kids to spend them on others? i.e. Taking school funds from a rich part of town and diverting them to the school in the poor part of town?

    @Matt
    So…Bill Gates for President then? Might be a nice convenient way to get the Justice Department to ignore all those pesky anti-trust laws. Or to throw Steve Jobs in federal prison (I assume they could also buy Congress, amend the constitution and so enact any laws they want).

  11. Another way to look at it is that people with (children and) grandchildren get huge subsidies all through their adult lives, hidden stuff.

    I pay property taxes that mostly go to schools, which I don’t use or benefit from. Income taxes are skewed to screw the single and childless. Zoning and the low taxes it brings is something that mostly benefits families, who get to live on large square footage lots in big one- or two-storey houses at minimal cost per square foot of on-the-ground area relative to apartment dwellers.

    It goes on and on. All of society is one big wealth transfer to people having children. How does this make sense? In the short term I guess there are economic advantages. But how far does it go? For instance, bottom line, global warming is just population.

  12. Chen: Under our current system of borrowing from future generations to pay for current consumption, we need to subsidize the production to children. Unless the U.S. population grows to 1 billion by 2100 (as some demographers suggest it will, mostly through immigration), there won’t be enough workers to hit with payroll taxes to pay for Social Security, Medicare, the national debt, etc. I guess you could argue that it would be cheaper to bring in adult immigrants than to grow children locally, especially given that the only way we can educate children, apparently, is with civil servants who earn $250,000/year (including an honest accounting of teacher pension costs). But as we’ve shown with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_Shahzad we don’t seem to be very good at selecting immigrants who will be net contributors to our society.

  13. Old people get all the money because they have nothing better to do than vote. Children do not vote.

    If parents of children were as vocal as old people, maybe Florida wouldn’t have as many licensed drivers as they do now.

  14. I am afraid, it would be technically more feasible to outlaw 1) government deficit and 2) government (state, local, federal) pensions (i.e. hidden deficit)

    Even single states are not allowed to run into deficit, just as e.g. European Union or Germany – that has passed a constitutional amendment limiting deficits to at most 0.35 %

    This would prevent whatever expenses of whichever from being passed on the next generations without bitter discussions on who should be allowed to vote – there is probably no really just democratic system…

  15. This has got to be a joke. Remove voting access to the baby boomers and of course the next generation will strip them of all benefits that could be transfered to them instead, destroying the security that government is supposed to provide.

    Is there anyone that doesn’t vote in their best self-interest? Maybe a few enlightened subscribe to the “tax me more!” philosophy, but most don’t. Most vote with their wallet, or even worse reasons like fear. I don’t understand how you can even call it a democracy if you were to keep people out of the voting pool.

  16. The GaveKal financial daily newsletter suggests that this issue is a serious problem in Japan:

    A couple days ago, Japan played England in a World Cup warm-up match.
    The game started well enough for the boys in blue as they went up 1-0
    within seven minutes. The team then remembered that it was Japanese and
    scored two own goals in quick succession to let England run away with a
    wholly undeserved 2-1 win. For most of the people that we talk to, this
    epitomizes their experience of investing in Japan; even when everything
    is lined up for a Japanese win, somehow policymakers will manage to find
    a way to make a hash of things and investors will end up with a loss.
    This feeling is especially strong right now after PM Hatoyama- whose DPJ
    historically swept the LDP back in September and triggered hopes of a
    significant wave of reform-today announced that he planned to step down.
    The resignation of yet another PM with a tenure of less than a year
    (following Abe, Fukuda and Aso) raises the question of whether a
    democracy such as Japan’s-with a majority of voters now at or close to,
    retirement age-is governable?

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