Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life? That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?
…The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to sixteen-year olds. But let’s do this instead: let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.
I share Vance’s sentiments. I think that old-fashioned two-parent households with children tend to exhibit less political insanity.
But his electoral reform proposal does not strike me as well worked out. What if parents disagree on politics? Which parent gets to vote on behalf of the children? In a divorce, who gets custody of the votes? etc.
Perhaps what matters most is not political power but cultural power. In the 1950s, the cultural hegemony was with the Ozzie and Harriett families. Today, it is with LBGTQ. Have a nice day, J.D.
George Washington and James Madison had no children. It would have been a very different country if they had had a lot less political influence because of it.
Not that this is a serious proposal. It’s just J.D. flattering and pandering to his political base before he is even elected. Surely as the policy is more developed there will be quickly realized the need for tweaks to avoid giving more political power to black unwed mothers with every new birth.
Seems like American political discourse gets dumber every day.
Why stop there? Jesus didn’t have any children either, but he was more than willing to die for our sins.
“Surely as the policy is more developed there will be quickly realized the need for tweaks to avoid giving more political power to black unwed mothers with every new birth.”
+1 I wouldn’t necessarily inject race into it (it’s more about class), but you are onto something here.
Hat tip to Kurt B for his holy awareness!
Even though I was childless, I still deserved the right vote, notwithstanding that the Romans would have outvoted outvoted me 4:1.
Or, would you prefer that the Prophet Muhammad have more votes than me?
GWB and James Madison had no problems denying the franchise to the vast majority of citizens in their own time, even the vast majority of white males.
Anyway, JD isn’t proposing that the childless can’t run for office, but that those with kids get more of a weight at the polls.
>—-“GWB and James Madison had no problems denying the franchise to the vast majority of citizens in their own time, even the vast majority of white males.”
True but so what? What’s your point?
It was a huge step towards a more democratic form of government for that time. That’s the historically interesting thing about it. Surely you aren’t proposing we adopt the woke standard of judging historical figures by the norms in effect centuries after their times.
>—“Anyway, JD isn’t proposing that the childless can’t run for office, but that those with kids get more of a weight at the polls.”
Right. So who is it that you think suggested he was proposing that the childless can’t run for office? I think I missed the part when someone did that.
Right. I’m a childless forty-something drug addict living in the bay area, and my politics are further to the right than everyone my age who’s managed to get married and have kids.
The men I know who’ve gotten it together are more involved in their community organizations and deferential to their wives, all of which and whom are firmly progressive in their politics. These men are actually less free to deviate from those politics than I am.
But California is a weird place. Being institutional and normie leads you further away from progressivism in other places, not closer to it as it does here.
I think Robert Nozick (ASU) was strongly affected by his more progressive, emotional wife.
I am, and it’s OK. So I’m a libertarian Republican, supporter of families as the key foundation for a successful, sustainable civilization.
We need more family friendly politics. Orban in Hungary is more right on this issue than US Reps, so far.
Since the US dumped secret ballots in the 2020 election and went with mail-in ballots, this is pretty close to what is already happening. Reports are that a politically strident family member, typically the mother, insists on every member of the household completing their ballot under her supervision. Similarly nursing home administrators have control over their residents’ ballots. Perhaps you need a “path to North Korea watch” along the lines of your “path to sociology watch.”. In North Korea ballots are completed at the workplace under management supervision. It is difficult to know how common that practice has become in the US because, like in North Korea, there are no independent or reliably accurate news sources reporting from the US which under covid travel regulations has become an isolated hermit kingdom as well.
Maybe we just go back to the ancient tradition of restricting the vote to property holding men at a public polling place?
Or more like what we have now, just let social media network owners get together in a room and make all the decisions. Zuckerberg’s tax exempt lobbying groups already control election administration in several states and they all coordinate decisions on what news can be reported via social media. Looking at how well our onanistic “experts” are doing representing us, the uninformed masses, these days back in their perches of powers without anyone to put a leash on them, perhaps we’d be better off if the tech titan aristocracy were given an official House of Lords from which to put that leash on our incompetent expert class or at least provide input from someone who is at least competent at something.
Kamala Harris, anyone?
On the other hand, Liz Cheney has five kids.
Still, something is “off” about modern life. In S. Korea, the average woman has 0.84 children.
While endless population growth is probably a bad idea, these kinds of declines suggest something is wrong.
Globalists suggest the solution is for Korea or Japan to import labor. So, Korea would half non-Korean in a generation or two.
That’s a solution? Bryan Caplan loves that solution, except on steroids.
Bryan Caplan wrote a book encouraging people to have more kids.
Good point.
Although how people could have more kids as housing costs explode, due to property zoning but millions and millions of new immigrants…..
The globalist solution is laughable. For a crowd which claims to love diversity, they don’t seem to care much about having nations which are themselves diverse from one another. Like a world in which many of species of animal have died out, a world in which Korea or Japan or Germany aren’t nations with distinct culture, language and ethnicity, but rather just english speaking carbon copies of generic cosmopolitan modernity, would be a great tragedy.
Policy must be pro-social. It a society is at the point where it seems willing to let itself die out, it is a deeply diseased society, and those in proper authority should do whatever it can to help return it to health. Simply replacing its people to keep the pensions flowing to the last of the original inhabitants isn’t a solution, it’s just a funeral arrangement.
If you want to give political power to families with children, instead of going through circuitous way of giving it to the children to be directed via their parents, just give it directly to the families.
My proposal is simple: each family (meaning two married adults who jointly have or had legal custody over the same child) is allowed one vote. To cast that vote, both parents must show at the voting booth, each gets a paper ballot, fills it and drops into urn, and their votes are only counted if they match. Widows and widowers retain the right to vote, but not the divorcee, who need to remarry and have new children to regain it. If logistics prohibits you from voting, because of eg travel or sickness, tough luck — but a single vote doesn’t matter much anyway, so you lose almost nothing by missing your opportunity. People don’t ascribe much value to voting, few would use up a day off from their job just to cast a vote (though elections should be held on Sunday, FWIW), so I don’t see why we should go to great lengths to enable them to do so.
If childless people no longer have to pay taxes, then I’m all for it.
Also given that people with low IQs tend to have more children this would be an effective way to immediately make the electorate significantly dumber. If one is looking for ways to tilt the playing field in favor of the party agree with (which I obviously the point of this), It’s probably best to find a way that doesn’t have that effect.
Re political insanity: Arnold may be right about left wing political insanity, but I’d bet the people on the right who hate vaccines and think Trump won California also have more children than average.
TFR is only negatively correlated with IQ among leftists (its flat to positive on the right), so this would reduce the political influence of the high IQ left (but not the high IQ right).
The future always belongs to the people who had children in the past- this is the iron law of reality. Based on the fertility numbers of today, it isn’t hard to predict what the future is going to look like- it is going to look like southern Asia and Africa.
You give each parent an extra 0.5 votes. Not that hard.
How about something way simpler. The only people that can vote in a local school board election are the parents of children eligible for the go to school there. That would solve a lot of my most pressing political problems right now.
Unrelated but…WTF is happening in Florida?
93% of 65+ have had at least one shot of the vaccine. Deaths per capita are highest in Miami despite it having a higher vaccination rate than the rest of the state.
UK deaths didn’t surge with Delta, even as cases did.
On the other hand excess deaths don’t seem to bad in Florida, is this just that everyone that is dying happens to have COVID even if not dying OF covid? Unclear.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Genuinely perplexed.
Is immunity wearing off six months later? What vaccine did Florida get (reports say the lower dose Pfizer is less effective then higher dose Moderna against delta, and I also remember Moderna have worse side effects from higher dose).
There is are two simple answer to the wrinkles:
A child’s vote is allocated to the custodial parent whose birthday is closest to their own (i.e. the same way health insurance coverage is applied to a child when both parents have work coverage).
OR,
A child’s vote is allocated randomly to the parent. Each child gets an A and B vote. If they have a single parent, they submit both the A and B vote. If a two-parent household, each submits one. Then either the A or B sets is counted, based on a random draw.
I think with a progressive by family income tax, one should divide income by the number of family members to get the tax rates.
Ideally though, I’d prefer individual adults to be taxed progressively by consumption, with the children apportioned to the parents in a way that produces the lowest tax. It gets complicated but no more that the current system.
On further thought, this idea is so ridiculously unlikely, that it’s main In Real Life purpose is to get folks thinking about adults with or without kids.
Stop voting for politicians who are not married with children.
I’m actually as worried about single parents who seem far more likely to want to “marry Uncle Sugar”, for more money, than the childless. And more money / gov’t reward for being “needy” is the morally hazardous method of increasing needs.
It would be better to give more money to married folks with kids, based on where they live. Some large monthly amount ($100 for marriage plus $100 per kid?) at the 100% level of benefit, going to those who live in the bottom 20% ranked school districts of the nation. This benefit gets reduced by 2% for each school rank increase, so that the bottom 45% ranked district get 50%. And the benefit ends when it’s down to 10% ($10 + 10 per kid) at the 65% rank.
Rank school districts by income. So the money goes to people living in poor areas. Black, White, Hispanic, Asian.