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Should people on welfare be allowed to vote?[W:504]

Should be on welfare be allowed to vote?

  • Yes

    Votes: 99 82.5%

  • No

    Votes: 15 12.5%

  • Other

    Votes: 7 5.8%

  • Welcome To Costco I Love You

    Votes: 11 9.2%
  • Total voters
    120
AmericanSpartan said:
Should they be allowed to vote while on welfare?
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No but it's really hard to enforce. What if you were on welfare 1 day out of the election cycle? Would you be disallowed? What if you were on welfare all days but the 1 magic date? Would you be allowed? An even trickier question is this: What is an election cycle?

The spirit of your question would extend to people receiving military pay, pell grants, food stamps, social security, military retirement pay and so much more. There are many types of transfer payments that goes beyond the AFDC checks. I'm assuming that is what you mean by welfare. A lot of people would be pretty sore at you for excluding the military from voting just to make a point about how dirty those welfare recipients are. I think this is a no go. It wouldn't even make for discussion in congress.

I was a government employee for 5 years of my life. I didn't vote the entire time because I believed it was immoral for a government employee to vote. I still feel the same way today. By that logic, I would extend that to welfare recipients and social security recipients too. That's just my personal conviction. I cannot imagine any possible way that you could write that into law. That's saying a lot because I have a pretty big imagination.
 
Fiddytree said:
Pretty well, actually. We have to remember that they instituted the Alien and Sedition Acts with such a limited political class. Both the Alien and Sedition Acts as well as the Patriot Act are a defense of the entrenched and powerful structures of the country against foreign and impoverished entities out there perceived to create havoc and violence unsupporting of the nation-state. Now, you may say that while they indeed passed, there was fervent opposition by non-Federalist Party members. However that is to be granted, they had neither the numbers to immediately block such proposals, nor did they have the support of the more entrenched populace. The Federalist Party was mostly backed by your well-off merchant/investment class, while the Democratic-Republicans were lauded by yeoman farmers, poorer persons, and immigrants. In an American Republic where the wealthy landowners were the true gatekeepers of politics, the more well-off you were and the more entrenched in the region's history you were, the more likely you were to be a Federalist and more likely to support such restrictions on liberty. Aside from a concerned number of Democratic-Republicans who were well-off, their base of support was largely to be found in speaking for the yeoman farmers and the impoverished masses. After all, much of the backbone of the early Party divide centered on how you felt about the U.S. Constitution. A lot of the Democratic-Republican base were appalled by the lack of a Bill of Rights, whereas much of the Federalist-Party's base were quite comfortable without one.
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The Alien and Sedition Acts were done away with in 2 to 3 years. As for the Patriot Act, we're going on more than a decade.
 
Northern Light said:
Clearly any citizen should have the right to vote. The alternative is ideologically complicated and hard to justify.
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The alternative? You mean the alternatives. It's not democracy or totalitarianism. There are other styles of government.
 
Superfly said:
I don't like the idea of only certain people being allowed to vote anyway.

Smacks of the fat rich white guys, who were the only ones allowed to vote, before the 15th and 19th amendment.

All citizens should be able to vote, despite their station in life.
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Interestingly enough we didn't have the massive deficit problem then like we do now. Interesting.
 
Manc Skipper said:
Democracy is government by THE PEOPLE, Not just a select few.
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Then let's stop calling this government a democracy. Except for all the others, democracy is the BEST form of government.
 
Superfly said:
Ghetto people or not, they are still American citizens and still have the right to vote.
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Why? How does being an American citizen mean that you get the right to decide how the government interferes in the lives of others?
 
Gaius46 said:
So you'd deny the vote to people simply because you don't like the way they might vote? Do you see anything wrong with that picture?
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Not at all. In fact that's a pretty good way of looking at it. I wouldn't want people who disagree with me to represent me, so why would I want people who disagree with me to vote on who gets to represent me?

In any case the poor aren't a majority even if they all did manage to vote as a block. They're elected representatives are constrained by the Constitution, the Executive and the Judiciary. And finally the reality is money is power and is what makes the world go roud and by virtue of being poor the poor have very little power.
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Excuse the language, but LBJ would seem to disagree with you.

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phattonez said:
Interestingly enough we didn't have the massive deficit problem then like we do now. Interesting.
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Considering a fat-cat rich white guy put us into this deficit, I'll just bypass this comment. :shrug:

As it is, I will take the time to show my appreciation to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and all the other women who fought for my right to step into that voting booth, despite whether you, or any other knuckledragger, believes that I shouldn't have that right.
 
roguenuke said:
You don't know this.
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Sure I do. If you give people with no money the opportunity to vote for themselves more money, of course they'll vote for it. Why not? You've legalized it and made it sound moral by instilling the "virtues" of democracy.

Plus, those with plenty of wealth prefer to vote themselves both a) ways to maintain their current wealth by any means necessary and b) ways to increase their own wealth, even if through particularly corrupt means.
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Sure, but if the poor are not offered a vote then they can only get away with so much. However, once the democracy supports it, they can say that democracy has spoken and end all discussion.
 
phattonez said:
Sure I do. If you give people with no money the opportunity to vote for themselves more money, of course they'll vote for it. Why not? You've legalized it and made it sound moral by instilling the "virtues" of democracy.
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Why aren't government employees and welfare recipients making $80,000 per year? It seems illogical that welfare recipients would make so little. What's the catch? Why are they voting themselves small amounts of money?
 
phattonez said:
Are you aware that the Founding Fathers were against democracy?
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Are you aware that amendments are added to the Constitution to change things that the Framers originally did not add, or were not in approval of? The Constitution was written in 1787 by a bunch of rich white guys. It was amended to allow people of color to vote in 1870 (but blacks still had to fight for years to vote) and it was amended in 1920 for women to be able to vote.
 
phattonez said:
Sure I do. If you give people with no money the opportunity to vote for themselves more money, of course they'll vote for it. Why not? You've legalized it and made it sound moral by instilling the "virtues" of democracy.

Sure, but if the poor are not offered a vote then they can only get away with so much. However, once the democracy supports it, they can say that democracy has spoken and end all discussion.
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No, you don't know any of that. In fact, the very fact that people on welfare vote for all different kinds of people, including those who would like to end welfare proves you wrong.

I said nothing in the part you responded to last about the poor. Why did you go back to the poor? I was talking about the wealthy, those not on the welfare programs that we know people really mean when they say "should those on welfare not be allowed to vote?".
 
Geoist said:
I never said the Founders wanted a representative democracy. I do find it funny, though, how we are speaking of "The Founders" as if they were a single entity with a single mind.




I never said democracy alone secures individual rights.
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i did not say you said anything of the sort, however you did mention democracy which the founders hated democratic forms of government.
 
sweetpea said:
Why aren't government employees and welfare recipients making $80,000 per year? It seems illogical that welfare recipients would make so little. What's the catch? Why are they voting themselves small amounts of money?
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Most of the benefits lately have been going into education, especially higher education, where the benefits per year there are massive.
 
AmericanSpartan said:
Should they be allowed to vote while on welfare?
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If you're over 18 and you have an American citizenship, you should be allowed to vote. There are some places that permanently rescind a citizen's right to vote even after they have served their time to society for a crime, and that's a miscarriage of justice.
 
sweetpea said:
Income taxes. Not everyone pays income taxes.
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I'm talking about all taxes. There are people that depend entirely on another person and never buy anything or buy things with someone else's money.
 
Superfly said:
Are you aware that amendments are added to the Constitution to change things that the Framers originally did not add, or were not in approval of? The Constitution was written in 1787 by a bunch of rich white guys. It was amended to allow people of color to vote in 1870 (but blacks still had to fight for years to vote) and it was amended in 1920 for women to be able to vote.
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Therefore what? Now democracy is a good thing and the arguments against it no longer apply?
 
phattonez said:
You say there's no reasonable explanation, and then list a very reasonable explanation and then disregard it for no good reason.
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Except I didn't give a good reason for it; it being disallowing just people on Welfare from voting.

If you want to say the notions form de Tocqueville and Franklin are legitimate reasons to deny people the ability to vote, then the only reasonable choice would be to disallow anyone who is gaining a benefit from the government to be disallowed to vote.

There's no reasonable explanation for JUST disallowing those obtaining a welfare check to do it....but not disallowing everyone who works for any business or university that recieves government funding in some fashion to vote. To disallow anyone who has a government college loan from voting. To disallow anyone who is a government employee from voting. To disallow employees of government contractors from voting. And on and on.

Utilizing elections as a means of voting into power those who will use the coffers of the United States to give you more money in some fashion is not an endevour limited in scope to those recieving welfare.

So if you're going to say the notions I mentioned are "legitimate reasons" to limit who can vote, the only reasonable choice is to evenly enforce said limitation. Otherwise, you're not actually limiting peoples votes for those reasons...you're limiting them for purely partisan political reasons. You'd be using those political philosophers and figures words simply as cover in an effort to obfuscate your true purpose and dishonestly paint your effots as some noble cause of liberty when it's really standard fare political jockying.
 
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