Who cares who runs things?

Voting is frustrating. To really understand each individual issue, what each candidate says about the issue, what the candidate will actually DO about each issue, and understand all the factors involved in a 1 out of 3 vote, is mind blowing. I consider myself only smart enough to realize I don't know shit. There is a ton of shit involved on most of the issues, of which I think the public probably doesn't even have access to the information that matters.

That being said, even if I go through the hundreds of hours of understanding all of this, for my one vote:
-10 other voters will base theirs on race/gender/religion (especially the last one)
-40 will vote on what their family has historically voted
-5 will vote on appearance
-15 will vote on whatever CNN says is true
-10 will vote by their pocket book

The amount of people that actually look into the issues and try to understand the complexity behind their decision is extremely low. I feel like you should have to pass a 3 or 4 question exam on the candidate's core values to vote.

Do they want to expand healthcare? T/F
Do they want to stay in Iraq? T/F
Is he a large stoneman with a face largely composed of scars? T/F
2+2= ?

 

I worked at wording this in an understandable way, but it didn't sound right. So I'll sum it up quickly.

At the beginning, those who put more into society than they got out, got to vote. Ultimately it was in an indirect manner, but they got to vote. Now that everyone gets to vote, the growing majority is voting for more and more entitlements that they don't have to work for. And once an entitlement is in the system, it will never be removed.


To get back to the original focus, be it Democrat or Republican this will never really change. Politicians will gladly do whatever they can to stay in office. To think one politician is any different then another politician is laughable.

 

What's with people in this thread repeating this thing as though it's the least bit true? First of all, it wasn't those who put more into society that got to vote, it was free white land-owning males, something that goes right back to the ancient Romans and Greeks. They, of course, all had slaves.

More to the point are you really saying that slaves got more out of society than they put in? Or, for that matter, that no woman had a net positive value for society and universal suffrage was just another way of letting the underclass vote in a bunch of entitlements for themselves?

 

In the beginning of the United States, it was 1776. The country was significantly smaller. You say people who put more into society got the vote? That's because they were the ones in power, and didn't want to lose that power to all the slaves, women, and natives that they felt were inferior (yes, some the same people who signed a paper that said 'all men are created equal' also owned slaves).

People need to stop quoting the 'founding fathers' like it is some end-all be-all fucking argument winner. The Founding Fathers never could have fathomed the kind of society we have today. Do you really think they could take things like television, the internet, cars, atomic bombs, abortion, birth control, organ transplants, or any of the other astonishing technological advances that society has made? People keep saying "the founding fathers would have wanted it this way...' or "the founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they saw our country..."

You're right. They'd be fucking astonished that all these women and Hispanic and Black people are allowed to vote. They'd be fucking shocked that someone with a broken leg didn't have a 50% mortality rate. They'd be fucking flabbergasted at that flat picture on the wall with the people in it that talk to them!

Basically, from your statement, I can infer that you believe the following:

--All those slaves working in the fields weren't putting more into society than they were getting out. Keep in mind, they were getting no wages, most lived in fucking shanties, and they'd work incredibly long hours. They didn't deserve to vote.
--No women contributed more to society than they took out, ever. They didn't deserve to vote.

I get it. You're pissed that all those lazy fucks get to live on welfare while you have to work. Because people living on welfare have it fucking awesome. They're just rolling in your cash right now, and not totally wishing they could eat something other than fucking ramen noodles.

I get the distinct impression that some people here have never, ever seen the kind of conditions that people on welfare live in. They picture someone on welfare sitting in front of a tv living the same kind of lifestyle that a working person lives on. Going to movies and partying and shit. That's not how it works. I spent four years working with kids with disabilities. I worked with one family that was a single mother with 5 kids. Her husband used to beat the fuck out of her, so she finally left him with the kids. She worked a job as a janitor, but obviously that isn't enough for her to cover herself and 5 kids. She was the kind of person that needed entitlements just to fucking survive, for her and her kids.

Another family I worked with, the father was handicapped. His father had served in the military, but they wouldn't take him back because of his medical condition. He could barely walk, let alone fucking work. He tried to work, but no place would even consider hiring him. Know how much the government gave him to live on a month? $1600 and about 300 worth of food stamps. Oh, and he and his kid were on Medicaid, so they totally got the best health care ever, too. Yeah, they were living the fucking high life. But yeah, fuck him and his kid, right? I mean, they're clearly not contributing to society, why the fuck do they deserve the right to vote, huh? Why should they get a say in the kind of country they live in?

Do people take advantage of entitlements? Of fucking course they do. It would be ignorant and stupid to say that there aren't bad people who will take advantage of the system. The key isn't to take away all entitlements. That's like saying no one can play baseball because some players cheated and took steroids. The key is to shut the loopholes that allow people to take advantage of the system.

The bottom line is this: the 'founding fathers' are from a COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY DIFFERENT FUCKING TIME! Things worked WAY differently back then. For fuck sake, they couldn't even have CONCEIVED of some of the advances that society has made since their time. Stop pointing to them like some fucking beacons of holy and wise light, because yes, they were incredibly intelligent for their time, but that was THEIR time. Stop saying "the founding fathers this..." or "The founding fathers that..." because it is fucking meaningless.

 

Ah, so he wants to live in a feudal society where titles and land ownership is concentrated to a few select individuals, who then participate in democracy. Why, that's exactly what England was; nobles passed on their titles and land to their offspring, and gathered in parliament to vote on issues and approve funding for the head of state. They also collected their wealth and largesse on the work of those who lived within their landholdings. One might even say they had financial entitlements they neither had to work for nor earn.

If our esteemed member wants to live in that kind of society he could at least be honest about it and not even bother pretending that he's upholding the true vision of the founding fathers. Last time I checked, they fucking waged war against that particular form of government because someone else held all the power over them and they wanted to have a say in what went on. Hey, I think there's a teachable moment in there somewhere.

Now don't take this as disagreeing with the spirit of your post, but abortions have been known since the days when the hippocratic oath was written 2500 years ago. Mind you, modern medicine has largely rejected "I will not give a woman a pessary to an abortion", and doctors don't teach medicine for free to the sons of the people who taught them. Which is pretty much the same spirit in which the founding fathers should be taken.

 

This might be getting too off-topic but could you elucidate this a bit further? I hear this a lot from many people who are disheartened by "the process," and while there are a lot of reasons to think this is how things are, I think there are also many reasons to think otherwise. Every political science professor I've had who has commented on the subject has expressed that lobbying isn't nearly as big of a deal as most people think it is. Both liberal and conservative professors seem to agree on this. That having been said, I haven't taken any class specifically on lobbying or anything like that, so I can't really point you to any literature other than a few random articles I've found on my own.

That's not to say corporations don't exert a great deal of influence, but to what degree it's more than citizens, and to what degree it's in opposition to the public's interests is certainly up for debate. If a corporate lobbyist is heavily influencing the way a politician makes law, that's simply a function of how little the public cares about it. For example, the public doesn't give a shit about, say, who gets what government contract, and so they aren't going to have anyone lobbying for x corp. not to get the contract, but obviously the corporation will want it, so of course there will be influence. But take something like the health care bill, and you've got lobbyists coming from every angle trying to push their view to the politician, from the drug companies to the insurance companies, to doctors groups (AMA), to even strong interest groups comprised of regular* citizens. In this situation, what makes the drug company lobbyist more influential than the lobbyist fighting for what the group of concerned citizens want? If anything the latter will be stronger because that group actually controls votes. Corporations can't vote, and campaign donations only get you so far (shit, the whole point of campaign donations are they help you get votes).

It may be a bit of a clusterfucked system, but one of my pet peeves is this defeatist "the corporations control everything man." Bullshit. Concerned citizens can get laws passed if you have enough people rallied behind you, along with a bit of momentum. A group of mothers concerned about drunk driving managed to get the law changed in every state to make the drinking age 21 and heavily strengthen DUI punishments. You may say sure, that's because corporations don't care about that (although I'd counter that I bet Anheuser-Busch wishes it didn't have restrictions on who it could sell to), and that citizens couldn't do anything about things that matter to corporations. Without having any empirical examples on hand, I can tell you that if a group of citizens large enough threatened to vote for the other guy* then sure as shit the incumbent would listen to them. To quote Lasersailor: "Politicians will gladly do whatever they can to stay in office."

 

The above part of your post has been covered so I wanted to focus on the bolded part. For starters, of course politicians will do what they can to stay in office. What the fuck do you expect? That people are going to run for positions they don't want? How is wanting to stay in office proof that all politicians are the same?

Secondly, politicians differ on dozens, maybe hundreds of issues. I'll give some simple examples. If Bush doesn't get elected we might not have gone to war with Iraq, and if we had the approach could have significantly differed. Our economy might be a different state. If Obama doesn't get elected we wouldn't have the health care bill. Maybe things like going to war and how your personal health is handled don't register as important to you, but they matter to sane people.

Third, individual votes can matter. The fact that the Gore/Bush election was decided by a few hundred votes proves that. Even in elections decided by larger margins I still take issue with the approach of 'I only have one vote and that won't change anything so voting is pointless' stance. The reason for this is that there are a hundred million lazy assholes saying the same thing. If you want to join them that's fine - just don't be a fucking idiot and tell people that they're wasting their time.

 

Too bad the founding fathers didn't include term limits for Congressmen and Senators. It'd be nice if politicians could only stay in an elected position (other than the presidency) for say a maximum of say eight years during their life.

 

Which group could hire the best lobbyist? Which group could hire the most lobbyists?

Campaign donations only get you so far?

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/11/money-wins-white-house-and.html

The money is what wins. My campaign finance knowledge is a bit rusty, so I won't wade too far into this issue, but the money is what matters most in elections for the most part.

Lobbying is just a facet of that. Hell, it's a 3.46 billion dollar industry.
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php

 

And? Those lobbyists can't promise them votes.

And where did all this money come from that "bought" the election for Barack Obama? Let's see, your own source says that 88% of his funds were individual contributions (and much of "other" is from interest collected on that money). Clearly Barack Obama is in the pocket of his constituents, the American voter. What an asshole.

Besides that, and in a broader point, correlation does not equal causation in terms of campaign donations buying votes. Link. That's a link to Google Books, but if that doesn't work, what it basically says is that the money follows the vote, not the other way around. That is to say, if a politician is pro-gun rights and votes that way, that's who the NRA is going to contribute money to. They'd be pretty fucking stupid to try and contribute money to someone who has already declared themselves anti-gun; they're not going to change anyone's mind on the issue. So while it may seem that "ooh, they got money from the NRA and they voted for a pro-gun bill, Politician X must be in the NRA's pocket," that doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny. The more likely scenario is of course, the politician already feels/campaigned a certain way on the issue, and the NRA wants to help people who agree with them to win their districts, so they give money.

 

I'd argue against this. If someone's good, I want them to be able to stick around a long time. I do think people need to be more aware of their representatives and the things that they do, but I think there are some excellent examples of politicians who've stayed in for more than eight years.

 

People have been ripping into this post for about a page now, but I can't let this go. The statistic is that 47% of American households pay no federal income tax. It's up to you whether this bothers you or not, but saying that they pay nothing (in caps no less) is just wrong.

Personally I used to be pretty cynical about voting, but I'm losing patience with that attitude. Rendering yourself silent isn't a form of protest, you're not opting out of the system. You can't do that. You're giving tacit acceptance to whatever happens. It's good to be skeptical of the government, but this kind of defeatist apathy isn't healthy, it's adding to the problem. It's dangerous.

 

"We The People" takes a completely different tone when you're discussing career politicians who are exempt from the legislation they've passed.

Call me cynical, but I think an elected official who's in and out within a decade is much more in tune with the people than a politician who's been in office for 30 years. The 30 year politican is only concerned with staying in office and developing connections, in turn influencing their decisions.

I think a lot of the bullshit we complain about of our government would dry up if there was a circulation of talent every decade or so.

 

That right there's the important bit. If you're passing a law, I don't see why you'd need to exempt congressmen from the bill. I understand that having fresh talent might be beneficial, but fresh talent has all of the issues with owing things to people who helped get them elected with none of the experience of handling those folks, let alone getting to know the other representatives and figure out who will work with them on which issues. If you really don't like the incumbent, then vote 'em out. I think that there are some career politicians who might actually have the interest of the people in mind when they're passing laws, and we need to do what we can to find the people who don't and make sure they aren't our representatives. Having 30 years of experience can give a certain sense of perspective to a politician.

How do you feel about minimum age requirements on political office?

 

I think this article is really interesting. Robin Hanson suggests that democracy promotes hypocrisy:

With the discussion about how much your vote matters and such, I thought it was relevant. For me, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis: Making myself feel good about researching, forming and recording an opinion vs. the hassle of actually voting.