Replies

"I receive a pension as a result of career Marine Corps service which included 3 trips to Vietnam. I would think that should qualify me to vote under the proposal of this thread. (Also served in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor."

I thank you for your service. I enlisted in the National Guard myself during ODS. You're more than entitled to your pension, and to enjoy your retirement. And I'd agree that you should be able to publicly speak up for your cause if you feel that you or your fellow retirees are being mistreated in some way. But I'm not sure I'd agree that government pensioners of any kind should be voting. Anybody relying on taxpayers to pay their bills for them should not be able to vote themselves more-or-less directly a larger share of the public till, IMO.

I'm not sure I'd agree that government pensioners of any kind should be voting.

My government pension was earned and I paid for my social security. I pay taxes on both of those as well as on my earned income and investment income. Last year I paid over 17K in taxes. How you can think that I don't deserve to vote is hard to understand. There are plenty of taxpayers receiving some income from social security or government pensions who are far from "on the dole" and they would not tolerate losing the right to vote. In fact no one now able to vote would tolerate losing that right.

What is not right is that someone who pays no taxes gets the same voting influence as those who pay significant amounts of tax. It would be much more fair if someone paying little or no tax got one vote and those paying more tax got something like 1 vote per $1000 of tax paid.