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I don't know why you think someone who doesn't have a federal income tax burden doesn't have skin in the game.
"skin in the game" is one of those folksy sound bites that sounds profound when you don't have the nerve to say "poor people aren't voting red, so we need to make laws to keep them from voting."
A literal interpretation of someone having "skin in the game" would be someone who had something to lose based on the outcome of said game - and obviously, the poor could stand to lose a whole lot due to political decisions taken without their input. They are, in fact, the ones with the smallest margin for survival. So as a simile, it doesn't even make sense on the face of it.
You wouldn't be the only one who grew up in that world. Cotton Mill town. Dad grew up a sharecropper picking cotton by hand. Looking across all those people, there were very, very few who worked hard and still couldn't get ahead. They may not have gotten wealthy, but they had good homes, food on the table, and sent their kids off into the world with a good start. There were very few of the "shiftless and lazy" category because if they didn't work, they didn't eat. They had pride in what they had and what they did. Pride drove them to get ahead. Now we've taken away pride.
I can't say as I totally disagree with what you're saying as I saw plenty who didn't have pride as well as those who did have pride and were hard-put to take what used to be called hand-outs. Those people have always been around and always will be, generational poverty being what it is. A determined and lucky few escape the cycle; most do not.
My family was fairly well-off by county standards, but I saw plenty of what went on outside of the bubble provided by my parents. Some people just couldn't get ahead. All is takes is one accident, one emergency and everything would fall apart.
The thing is, the premise of the O.P. is that those hard-working folks back home and here who, between hours being cut on an already low wage job and perhaps child tax credits, fall under the heading of not paying income taxes. Some of them are small farmers whose net income is low enough to not pay (their taxes are a bit more complex in ways that I'll not go into here).
They don't deserve to have their right to vote in federal elections taken away because they don't pay income tax.
The idea that the tax divide is driven entirely by income is part of what people miss in this discussion. Because I work as a chef I've never made a lot of money, but I've always payed federal income taxes. How is this? I didn't qualify for any of the major deductions. It is mostly deductions that allow people to get their tax burdens below zero. The big ones are the mortgage interest deduction and the earned income tax credit for children. A significant portion of Social Security is also tax free. If you are a renter with no children and you work for Walmart you are almost certainly paying federal taxes. If you are a lower middle class homeowner with six kids and a big mortgage you are probably paying nothing. If you made a modest wage during your working life and are now retired and living entirely on Social Security you may also be paying no income tax.
So this proposal to take away the vote from those who don't pay taxes may not disenfranchise the people you all think it will. Young and/or childless low wage workers will still have the vote, it will mostly be lower middle class families that own homes who will be impacted.
My 16 year old works (started her summer job when she was 14) and has taxes withheld from her paycheck. Are you saying she should have been allowed to vote starting when she was 14?
and did she file a return? What was received back? She likely makes less than the 10k or whatever that limit for earned income is. Is she in public school, getting "freeeeee" lunch? On state medicaid? You haven't given enough information.
To paraphrase The Dude, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Why are you so hell-bent on disenfranchising your fellow citizens?
Do you think it's disenfranchising to the lower end middle class who pay thousands and thousands of taxes, receive nothing, yet their vote doesn't count because freeloaders are allowed to vote themselves more benefits?
The idea that the tax divide is driven entirely by income is part of what people miss in this discussion. Because I work as a chef I've never made a lot of money, but I've always payed federal income taxes. How is this? I didn't qualify for any of the major deductions. It is mostly deductions that allow people to get their tax burdens below zero. The big ones are the mortgage interest deduction and the earned income tax credit for children. A significant portion of Social Security is also tax free. If you are a renter with no children and you work for Walmart you are almost certainly paying federal taxes. If you are a lower middle class homeowner with six kids and a big mortgage you are probably paying nothing. If you made a modest wage during your working life and are now retired and living entirely on Social Security you may also be paying no income tax.
So this proposal to take away the vote from those who don't pay taxes may not disenfranchise the people you all think it will. Young and/or childless low wage workers will still have the vote, it will mostly be lower middle class families that own homes who will be impacted.
You're forgetting that a lot of low income people are receiving benefits from the government, healthcare, food stamps, etc so even if they "paid" 2k in federal taxes they get way more than that back so they are net takers
Do you think it's disenfranchising to the lower end middle class who pay thousands and thousands of taxes, receive nothing, yet their vote doesn't count because freeloaders are allowed to vote themselves more benefits?
How would you determine that someone is "retired"? Did they have to work full time up to 65 years old? How about if they were extremely successful and managed to be able to leave the work force at 40?
When you are seeking to keep certain people from voting, it's very important to find out who you're specifically trying to take the right to vote away from. What "particular group", as you say, you're trying to silence.
It's terribly ironic the OP recently started a thread defending populism but now in this thread is arguing the complete opposite. This idea is about the most completely elitist thing you could imagine, short of monarchy.
Do you think it's disenfranchising to the lower end middle class who pay thousands and thousands of taxes, receive nothing, yet their vote doesn't count because freeloaders are allowed to vote themselves more benefits?
As part of that lower end of the middle class tax bracket myself (I'm middle of the economic middle where I live), I don't hold with the notion that it's okay to disenfranchise lower income people of their vote in federal elections.
Those votes for representatives are about far more than "free" stuff--especially when it comes to single-issue voters. Trust me--those people aren't casting their votes for free higher education, even though a lot of them would surely benefit from it.
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