AIBU to think if you're a net negative in tax you shouldn't be able to vote?

[SBGM247]

Trigger warning: strong political views / rant incoming. A shrinking group is expected to fund an expanding system. The system increasingly penalises work while rewarding dependency.

AIBU to think the modern state is a parasite, and that only those who are a net positive in taxes should be able to vote, rather than forcing working people to support an ever-growing dependent class?

Currently ~21% of working-age adults are economically inactive, meaning not working and not actively seeking work (according to a research brief from the House of Commons). Democracy is broken if voters can vote themselves benefits paid for by others. Representation should be weighted toward those with demonstrable responsibility and contribution.

Currently, the state is extractive and hollowing out the middle class. As anyone that has the eyes to see and ears to hear will know, dependency is rising and and demographics are changing at a rate not seen outside of wartime.

To address this simply, I think if you’re on benefits you should lose the right to vote until you’re a net positive. That would restore equilibrium.

This is essentially Chesterton’s test of a society.

"An honest man falls in love with an honest woman. He wishes, therefore, to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this.

If any system, feudal, servile, or barbaric, does in fact give him enough land, work, or security that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice.

If any system, Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, Reform, or technocratic, does in fact give him wages so low and conditions so insecure that he cannot do it, there is the essence of tyranny and shame."

If the state could stop turning people into dependents that working people have to pay for, that would be great. The state is bloated, fixated on wealth redistribution rather than wealth creation, and actively working against the people it is meant to represent. It is incapable of creating the conditions for wealth, stability, and independence. This is managed decline, and we need some adults in the room who have read a book. AIBU?

The problem I keep coming back to, though, with your theory as originally expounded, is the pinnacle which you have set.

The majority in any country will be average earners, mainly because, to paraphrase a non-pc phrase, some of us have to be Indians in order that the Chiefs don't have to spend their valuable time getting the bins in.

The people who do the messy, minimum wage jobs are necessary. One of the biggest problems we have today is that so many people, regardless of ability, expect to be doing something other than cleaning the streets. Because cleaning the streets isn't valued. It would be valued even less if street cleaners couldn't vote, purely on the basis that they aren't 'net contributors'.

In order to achieve a state of affairs in which everybody working is a net contributor, your taxes would be off the scale. My life choices may mean I am not a 'net contributor', but they also mean that potential future 'drains' on society are given the best chance of not being so. Without people willing to work without being a 'net contributors', those youngsters would spend their lives in institutions with minimal input, as they once did.

We are all cogs in the wheel that keeps this country turning. If you had argued from the start that those who are unemployed out of a choice to stay on benefits shouldn't vote, I might have agreed. But you didn't. You chose to include the majority of the working masses who keep the supermarkets stocked, the streets swept, the children in school, the harvests gathered in, the streetlights on, etc.

Did we learn nothing from COVID about the value of these people? All of whom do pay tax, just not as much as you in terms of income, but we pay goods and services tax on the products we buy, tax on the cars we drive, tax on the homes we live in, even if we don't own them. All of us pay tax. We pay our NI contributions towards our pensions, etc.

I don't want UC. I'm not eligible anyway, but nobody working full time, no matter what at should be. Because the government shouldn't be subsidising the wealthiest employers and their shareholders, because that is what UC is. It's a means by which the rich can get richer by not paying the staff better. They'd all be a bit buggered if we all downed tools and chased the big money.

As I believe I have alluded to, actually, one of the biggest problems we have in this country is the expectation that we should all be earning the big money, being entrepreneurs, etc. we've almost moved back to a state of shipping in the brown people to do the jobs we think we are too good for.

Not only can not all of us join the 1%, it would be a disaster if we did. Because we need all the cogs at all the levels, from the bottom to the top, to keep this country moving. And all of us, from the bottom to the top, need a say in the society we live in, in the laws we are expected to abide by, in the things the government does, as I have said before, that go beyond who benefits and who pays.

You are making no sense and the leap to are you suggesting some sort of karma style thing where he deserved to be born here? is absurd.

This has nothing to do with who 'deserves' to be born where or with what attributes. Typical straw man argument. People love to wheel out the disabled to shut the conversation down, because they think it makes them morally untouchable. It's just not relevant to the point I was making about luck being politicised and used to diminish the effort behind financial success or independence.

SBGM247 , I can't believe you're still here making a spectacle of yourself.
Few people, other than yourself and a few like -minded souls, would query universal suffrage.
Personally, I don't pay much heed to the minority agreeing with you, who, I suspect, were baited by the thought of punishing so-called scroungers.

It took hundreds of years to establish our democracy, including universal suffrage and it has been the envy of the world.

I'm tempted to say what I think about your comparisons to Kabuki theatre and advice to 'roast again', but MN would probably delete my post for being unkind.

So I'll leave it at that. I'm sure that many readers will know what I mean ...

Can you go now and find something useful to do?

I didn't "wheel out the disabled" I just think your post made no sense. I have never heard anyone say that being successful is down to luck but where you are born isn't. You're the one making a straw man there.

@SixtySomething forgive me for asking some obvious questions....

1. Why are you here?
2. If you're going to suggest someone go; wouldn't it make more sense that you become the change you want to see in the world?
3. I started this thread so clearly I want to be here. If you don't then why don't you leave?

Your participation isn't critical.

You have made some good pints in amongst your more out there ones. Rather than limiting voting how about about a focus on helping more people become more informed voters. Some people are beyond, help but that doesn't mean their children are unreachable.

Why couldn't someone on minimal wage be a net contributor? I'm not 100% clear why you think this is an impossibility? If you do think that @ObelixtheGaul?

It's a blank slate from the age of 18.

Yes, I could meet you in the middle and agree on something more pragmatic like that @NorthXNorthWest if we could close the borders and focus on a renaissance in our values as a country. We certainly need it. We need rationale hope.

What has your disabled cousin got to do financial compensation for hard work being reduced to luck? Who mentioned anything about what your disabled cousin does or doesn't deserve?

Love that you respect your cousin enough to try weaponise him. Love that it wasn't the gotcha you thought it was. You you keep digging with with that straw spade.

The middle must a votes for all starting point...

I was responding to your yet somehow it’s never considered ‘luck’ to live in a country with a welfare state with an example of how I did consider it good luck to live in a country with a welfare state.

Oh great, let's go back to pre-democracy days when only property owners could vote.

The whole point of voting in a democracy is that EVERYONE has the right to vote and be represented on matters that affect them.

He didn’t quote Hamlet. He quoted Withnail & I. Whether he knows it’s from Hamlet or not isn’t clear.

I think hardly anybody comes out as a net contributor in terms of money - effectively the majority of us are subsidised by the super rich.

However, I agree that voting should be linked to participation. If you have pre-children you are working many many hours in an unpaid job, but obviously contributing. Also if you are bringing your children up to be well adjusted and polite and decent then you are partcipating to better effect for society. Maybe the answer is more votes for better contributions.

Working full time, however, also seems to me to qualify as participation. Extra voting power for distinguished work? Prizewinning nurses get double weighted votes?

Where your analysis is accurate is that when everybody in society is in a special interest group that expects the State to subsidise them, and they vote, governments are utterly corrupted by the necessity of getting elected by a majority which requires at least some of the special interest groups’ votes.

However, it’s a bit brutal because our system does not acknowledge unpaid labour except by making ‘carer’s allowances’ which are both unaffordable for the state and too little to live on for an individual.

Ok.

So what part does “luck” play as you define it?

We know the babies belong to their parents, but they are not with their parents.

Baby A should have benefitted from all the hard work that their ancestors put in over the years, but they will not.

Baby B should have been with a family of feckless wasters but is now living with Family A.

Is Baby A unlucky that all the opportunities set up for them are going to someone else?

Is Baby B lucky to have those opportunities that none of their ancestors have worked for?

Just to add:

When a country is down to 60% turnout in a General Election, democracy is at crisis point. We should be looking for reasons why people don't vote and try to combat them. The very LAST thing we need is increased restrictions on who can vote.

The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly and ordered their estate, eh?

Didn't think this was going to progress into All Things Bright and Beautiful, but the Internet never fails to disappoint.

I meant pre-school children cos they are 24/7.

Keep. Digging.

I haven't said luck doesn't exist. Only, that you can't write everything off as 'luck'.

Yes, I knew it was from Hamlet. I thought the ending in Withnail was beautiful and bleak and expressed Nihilism very well so it was a pastiche that worked better than the original.

I really don't think that should be the point. The point of good governance is sustainable development, protect rights, manage resources efficiently, and deliver fair, high-quality services for all stakeholders, preventing corruption and ensuring long-term success. If we get better outcomes by thinking about how we weight votes that's valid. And it would be in the pursuit of a vision and a purpose one would hope downstream of culture.

Because for me to contribute 45% of my earnings would leave me with not enough to live on. And I mean 'live', not 'have a lifestyle'.

It's impossible for me to do the job that I do and keep a roof over my head and feed myself and keep myself warm on a little over half of what I earn. Because what I earn is considerably lower than that of a net contributor.
Obviously.

And I don't even have a car, let alone HP on one.

If you mean, 'why couldn't I have become a net contributor by earning more later, well, yes. But if we all did that, we'd be leaving what I view as important work to the teenagers and twenty something's rushing through and seeing it as a penance to do before they get something 'better'. Which is something we are already seeing as more and more are being pushed into a world of expectation, and, increasingly, a world which is unaffordable without a high income.

What I do has value to society. We need people to be able to do it for it's own sake, not to mark time, or keep them alive whilst they work their way up. We need people to want to do it.

I was fortunate enough to be able to get on the property ladder in the sweet window in the 90s, when you could get a mortgage on a low wage. 25 years later, I paid that off. I'm not a burden or a drain. This house will pay for my later in life care. I've got my own little pension pot, I've claimed no benefits, I keep myself healthy.

I am proud of never being out of work, of building my little fund, of working hard for what I have. It wasn't given to me. I don't ask for more than I have. But I do think that years of working (I currently have two jobs, btw) ought to have value in and of itself. I haven't been lazy. I haven't been profligate. I've dedicated a good portion of my life to giving some of the most vulnerable in society, care and support.

I wanted to be a film star when I was a child. I could have pursued that path. I had opportunity when older to return to that and have a chance at becoming a 'net contributor' by working in television. Would I have had more value if I'd done that? I don't think so. What I do is harder work, certainly not as much 'fun' as acting, (and please don't think I don't think the arts aren't important, I absolutely do), but I am of more use where I am, doing work thousands aren't queuing up to do.

If I had no choice but to seek more money to get a vote, I would have done it, perhaps. And that would have been one less person who gave a damn doing the job I do. And one more person doing it to get to something else. And an end to what used to be seen as 'vocations'. Jobs we do because they transcend personal wealth.

We are already seeing the death of a society which worked for something other than personal gain. As we pursue the almighty dollar, counting the cost of everything and the value of nothing, viewing ambition only through the lens of personal monetary gain, we lose so much.

Off track a bit, there, but hey ho. It's been interesting.

This.

Women on maternity leave.

Low paid workers.

Sounds like a regime.

I get your sentiment but I don’t agree. I think anyone over the age of 18 should be able to vote. We’ll always have workshy people but they should be entitled to vote for that lifestyle.