Only People That Pay Income Tax or the Capital Gains Tax Should Be Able to Vote

A more responsible way of looking at voting and taxes

There is a tale as old as time about the way popular restaurants often die an ignominious death.

It starts with a business owner building an incredible new place to eat. The food is great, the service is amazing, and word of mouth is so good that the restaurant fills up every night.

Then, as time goes on, the restaurant owner gets tired of working long hours and stops paying attention to the details. He shrinks the size of the plates and waters down the ingredients and for a while, it seems like he’s making more money than ever, but he puts that into his lifestyle, not updating the restaurant.

After a few years, the décor looks a little out of date, the restaurant’s reputation has slipped, and the crowds are no longer flocking in. Then, the competition gets a little tougher or the restaurant gets pegged as old and out of date, and eventually, the place closes or “accidentally” burns down.

Game over.

Well, most people don’t think of a government like a restaurant, but they’re much more alike than you might think. Just as the lifeblood of a restaurant is the paying customers, the lifeblood of a government is the taxpayers. They’re the ones who support themselves and pay enough in taxes on top of that to float the government.

The military, police, street signs, regulatory agencies, welfare, you name it, it’s all dependent on these people. Just like the paying customers of a restaurant, if you take the taxpayers out of the equation, everything collapses soon after. That’s because our government already has some assets and it can borrow money, but like the restaurant owner whose customers flee to greener pastures, the doors close in a hurry without that new money coming in.

Granted, in a nation with lots of competing interests, the government can’t always do whatever the taxpayers want, but they should still get a lot of deference. Plain and simple, the people who pay the bills are more important than those that don’t. So, for example, taxpayers matter more and should be prioritized ahead of junkies, homeless people, criminals, illegals and welfare recipients.

Along these lines paying either the income tax or capital gains tax in a given year should be a basic qualification for voting (With an exemption for people who paid in for say 10-20+ years throughout their lives and maybe one for the military, too).

In a world where the government is spending our collective money, it shouldn’t even be controversial to say that the people who are paying taxes should have a lot more say about what’s done with that money than the freeloaders who only take, but never give.

In general, the idea that the people who pay all the bills and want let’s say roads can be overruled by the people who aren’t paying into the system and want “free goodies” everyone else has to pay for is nuts.

Granted, America didn’t have this problem early on because they were smarter than we are today in a lot of ways. Back then, it wasn’t quite “If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” but it was pretty close. They also had a small government and no welfare. People had to work, almost by necessity.

Today, we have an overly progressive tax system and a welfare state in place that has created a large body of people who take more from society than they give. That puts us in a very dangerous position that could literally lead to the end of America.

It’s like the famous quote goes:

That’s the direction America is moving in today and a big part of the reason why is that so many people with no skin in the game have a say in what other people’s money is being spent on. The numbers are huge:

In total, about 59.9 percent of U.S. households paid income tax in 2022. The remaining 40.1 percent of households paid no individual income tax.

How do you think the government is ever going to control spending, act responsibly, and make some kind of effort to give taxpayers value for their money when such a large percentage of the population is basically voting on what to do with money they had no part in earning?

Certainly, if it were actually working, I’d be the first to say, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” However, at this point, it’s hard to see how we can possibly escape financial destruction when we’re spending like this.

Would only letting taxpayers vote fix this problem? At this point, it’s hard to say because we’re so far gone. It’s like asking, “How do I avoid dying of a heart attack?” It’s a lot easier to answer that question if it’s asked by a healthy 30-year-old than a seventy-year-old with awful habits, blocked arteries, and out-of-control blood pressure.

That being said, if our country is going to avoid dying of an economic “heart attack,” having taxpayers call the shots would be one our best shots to do it because as the late, great Milton Friedman said:

If the people who were paying the taxes were entirely responsible for electing the representatives who determined how those taxes were spent, you could be absolutely certain our government would look very different. It would be a lot smaller, with a lot less debt, and a lot less welfare. Politicians would be focused like a laser on showing taxpayers that they’re getting value for their money, as opposed to spending money like water, borrowing more, and calling the people who pay the bills “greedy” for not wanting to give the government more of their money to waste on projects they wouldn’t want to be done at any price.

The Founding Fathers of our country were right to be adamantly opposed to taxation without representation, but I’d like to think that if they could see the world we have today, they’d be just as opposed to the sheer number of people who effectively get representation without taxation because they get so much more in welfare and government programs than they’ll ever pay into the system.

The purpose of the dog isn’t supposed to be to feed an ever-growing population of ticks and fleas. Taxpayers aren’t supposed to be workhorses that just blindly pull everyone else along to wherever they want to go. We’re at a point in America where the government is ignoring most of the makers, the producers and the people paying the bills to cater to the takers, the leeches and the people who’ve lived their lives dependent on mommy and daddy or the dole. Long term, America is not going to survive that way.

---