Andrew Yang was in Concord recently, pushing to lower the minimum voting age to 16. His reasoning? If 16-year-olds can earn income and pay taxes, they should have a say in how that money is spent.
Fair enough. But it raises an interesting question. There’s no lower age limit for earning money and paying taxes. So why use age at all, rather than using income and taxation directly, to determine who can vote, and who can’t?
That is, if we follow his argument to its logical conclusion, the question of age becomes entirely irrelevant to the issue of voting. If you pay taxes, you can vote. If you don’t, you can’t.
Of course, there are a couple of wrinkles that need to be considered.
The first wrinkle is that some people ‘pay taxes’, but take a lot more out of the pot than they put in. We need to consider, not the gross amount, but the net. That is, subtract from your gross tax bill for a particular jurisdiction any directly identifiable subsidies or payments (including salaries and pensions) that you receive from that jurisdiction, and if the result is greater than zero, then you get to vote in elections held by the jurisdiction.
(Note that this would prevent most parents who have children in public schools from voting in town elections, which would go a long way towards bringing education costs under control!)
The second wrinkle is that individuals pay radically different amounts of taxes. If you contribute $1 million, and I contribute $1000, it’s insane to think that my vote should count the same as yours when deciding how to spend that money.
That is, we would want to replace the idea of ‘one man, one vote’ with something more along the lines of ‘one share, one vote’. After all, if we’re going to run government like a corporation — generating ‘revenue’ through taxes in order to provide ‘goods’ and ‘services’ to ‘customers’ — then we should vote like a corporation.
Note that Yang dismisses the criticism that there are a lot of 16-year-olds who aren’t well-informed enough to vote. His reasoning? There are also a lot of older people who aren’t well-informed, ‘so that argument against 16-year-olds voting doesn’t hold water’.
If that’s true, then it also fails to hold water as an argument against 12-year-olds voting, or even 6-year-olds. Again, whether he realizes it or not, he’s arguing for taking age out of the equation entirely. But by choosing one arbitrary limit (16) instead of another (18), he’s showing that he lacks the courage of his convictions.
It is, of course, crazy to intentionally expand the pool of poorly-informed voters, rather than working to reduce it. Fortunately, there’s a straightforward way to allow uninformed people to vote without allowing them to overwhelm the rest of the electorate with their ignorance.
In the end, it’s not that Yang is going too far, but that he’s not going far enough.
Just as we need to stop using age as a way of determining what someone should be learning in school, we need to stop using age as a way of determining whether someone should be allowed to vote. In both cases, we need to replace an arbitrary age-based qualification system with a demonstration-based alternative.
