Changing the Vote

The New York Times published a good-sized article on 8-28 regarding the world wide trend in lowering the voting age down to 16. A few countries have already done it for their young citizens, while only Iran is paddling backwards by raising their minimum age. Numerous opinions are given in the article for lowering the U.S. voting age from 18 to 16, and a few faint voices in the wilderness of U.S. proponents even cite a few good reasons.

Unfortunately, they all miss the big "X" mark. Outspoken Noctaluca lead singer Jason Ludwig (http://www.noctaluca.com/) has long wondered about the voting age being held up at 18, but his slant is probably the most lucid of all arguments I've heard.

"It's a travesty in this country that for two to three years of your young working life, you are paying your government dues without any democratic recourse, namely the right to vote." He ties it all together neatly with, "It's clearly taxation without representation."

He's right. I'm surprised it's gone on like this so long, and wonder why those kids aren't protesting this at Post Offices every April 15th. We know Congress will never dump those taxes. So just lower the voting age now. Period, no argument. We fought a little revolution over this a few years ago, didn't we?

Personally, I'd prefer a total pre-voting tax moratorium, and I wonder if the current policy isn't intentional to disenfranchise that demographic from the election process even before they get started. What else explains the very low entry U.S. voter turnout percentage? (See chart in NYT article.) Either that, or, after working tax free for a few years, lawmakers don't want young workers to suddenly feel the full shock from Uncle Sam's bite suddenly slashing take home pay right at voting age.

If that happened, they might start asking what all that money is really used for.

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=voting+age&srchst=nyt