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tfan
Joined: 31 May 2010
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 Posted: 03/14/19 8:17 pm ::: Age 16 Voting |
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PELOSI SAYS SHE PERSONALLY SUPPORTS LOWERING THE VOTING AGE TO 16
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| “I myself, personally, I’m not speaking for my caucus, I myself have always been for lowering the voting age to 16,” Pelosi said when asked by The Daily Caller about her thoughts on the issue. |
Once upon a time, the drinking age was lowered nationally to 18. I always thought the rationale was that if you are old enough to fight in Vietnam, then you are old enough to drink. But I remember reading some other reasoning which escapes me now. Anyway, the Reagan Administration put pressure on the states to raise it to 21 (many of which had already been doing so).
But 16-year-old voting poses a similar issue (old enough for one adult thing but not another) to me. If they are too young to drink and have sex with someone over 17 and buy cigarettes and rent a car and all the other things where you "have to be 18" which suggests that they are not equivalent to adults, I don't see why they should be then considered equivalent to adults with regard to voting.
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justintyme
Joined: 08 Jul 2012
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Location: Northfield, MN
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| Posted: 03/14/19 9:14 pm ::: Re: Age 16 Voting |
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| tfan wrote: |
PELOSI SAYS SHE PERSONALLY SUPPORTS LOWERING THE VOTING AGE TO 16
| Quote: |
| “I myself, personally, I’m not speaking for my caucus, I myself have always been for lowering the voting age to 16,” Pelosi said when asked by The Daily Caller about her thoughts on the issue. |
Once upon a time, the drinking age was lowered nationally to 18. I always thought the rationale was that if you are old enough to fight in Vietnam, then you are old enough to drink. But I remember reading some other reasoning which escapes me now. Anyway, the Reagan Administration put pressure on the states to raise it to 21 (many of which had already been doing so).
But 16-year-old voting poses a similar issue (old enough for one adult thing but not another) to me. If they are too young to drink and have sex with someone over 17 and buy cigarettes and rent a car and all the other things where you "have to be 18" which suggests that they are not equivalent to adults, I don't see why they should be then considered equivalent to adults with regard to voting. |
The age of consent in about 2/3 of the states is 16...
But the obvious argument is that people make these decisions about "drinking age" and other things that will affect them while they have no say in the process, yet have the intellectual development to process the concepts and reach a conclusion just as capably as an 18 year old.
Personally, my feeling around voting has always been the more inclusive/expansive the policies the better. If someone is to be excluded there should be a very good reason (for instance 16 is likely the youngest you could go).
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tfan
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: 03/16/19 12:07 am ::: Re: Age 16 Voting |
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| justintyme wrote: |
The age of consent in about 2/3 of the states is 16... |
That still leaves a lot of stuff that we don't consider 16-year-olds old enough to do. Like watch NC-17 movies. The smoking age also varies by state, but the youngest age allowed is 18. Although I didn't realize that limits on working hours only apply before age 16, so that jives with age 16 voting. And I am surprised to see that drivers license permits are granted at or before age 16 across the country. And it says that a regular driver's license can come 6 months after that, and probably a year max. So 16-year-olds are driving in a lot of states.
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| But the obvious argument is that people make these decisions about "drinking age" and other things that will affect them while they have no say in the process, yet have the intellectual development to process the concepts and reach a conclusion just as capable as an 18-year-old. |
Not sure I understand that paragraph. But I doubt that 16-year-olds voting would get the drinking age to 16 any more than 18-year-olds voting kept it at 18.
But regarding drinking age, I talked to someone from Germany who said that you can drink much younger there. I asked him about high school age kids going wild and he felt that because it isn't illegal it doesn't have the appeal to teenagers that it does over here. On the other hand, a certain amount of people get addicted to alcohol, and probably better to postpone that past high school. Because of the way alcohol ruins lives (including family members of the alcoholic) I would favour bringing back prohibition. I know it is normally claimed that "drinking went up during prohibition" but I find that hard to believe and heard someone on the radio who had studied prohibition say as much. In any event, I think it would be impossible in 2019 for bars, liquor stores, supermarkets and restaurants to all stop selling alcohol and illegal production/sales to more than make up for that.
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justintyme
Joined: 08 Jul 2012
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Location: Northfield, MN
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| Posted: 03/16/19 6:28 am ::: Re: Age 16 Voting |
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| tfan wrote: |
Not sure I understand that paragraph. But I doubt that 16-year-olds voting would get the drinking age to 16 any more than 18-year-olds voting kept it at 18.
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Probably not. But the point being that if laws are going to affect a person in a democracy, they should probably have a say in them, as long as they are intellectually capable of understanding the issues at hand.
It is from the same line of thinking as "No taxation without representation".
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