No taxation without representation

It's there. In the constitution.

NO taxation without representation.

All of you probably worked/are working in high school.

The minimum wage in WA state is $7.something. Let's say you work 30 hours a week. The income tax in WA state is 8.4% (IIRC) That is 7*30*4*12/100*8.4=$847

The government siphons $847 per year per person from working minors. Multiply that by the number of working 16-18 year-olds, which is definitely in the MILLIONS. As you can see the government steals BILLIONS of dollars every year from minors who are being unlawfully taxed.

Either give them the vote, or don't tax them.

Also, non-citizens pay tax as well... but they don't get to vote either. My dad gets taxed 40%, and he doesn't get the vote... boohoo.

Thoughts?

The "No taxation without representation" applies to full citizens. A working minor is not a full citizen until they reach the age of 18. And your father is not a U.S. citizen. If your father feels strongly about participating in U.S. elections, he can always apply for citizenship.

How do you define 'full citizen'? It is a term I have not heard before, and am unsure of exactly how many rights and responsibilities an 'incomplete citizen' would recieve.

Is voting for example the only right of citizenship that minors do not recieve, or are there also others?

I was kidding, the part about my dad...

Would you be so kind as to provide us with details on how 'full citizenship' works? Something in the constitution, maybe?

How do you define 'full citizen'? It is a term I have not heard before, and am unsure of exactly how many rights and responsibilities an 'incomplete citizen' would recieve.

Is voting for example the only right of citizenship that minors do not recieve, or are there also others?

Concerning taxation without representation, I think that taxation WITH representation is sometimes worse. As Mel Gibson said in the movie The Patriot, "Why should I exchange one tyrant, three thousand miles away, for three thousand tyrants, one mile away?"

Although, as a conservative, I am expected to be against the Federal government. my experience tells me that government becomes more tyrannical, the closer it gets to me.

In my home county, after trying and failing for twenty years, there is now a county Zoning Board. Note that my county is primarily rural, farm country. Along an interstate highway that cuts the county in half, some of the best farmland in America exists. The highway is a direct link to Chicago, 70 miles away.

So, let's say that a developer drives by a particularly good-looking piece of property and says, "That would make a great place for a Housing Development!" He looks up the owner, and offers a million dollars for the property. However, the farmer responds, "My family has owned and worked this land for generations. I want to pass it on to my son. Thanks, but no thanks."

Accordingly, the developer goes to the County Zoning Board, greases the right palms, and before you know it, the land is re-zoned "Residential". Now, the farmer can still hold on to his land, if he wants, but he can't work it, because it's residential. It becomes useless to him, and he still has to pay property taxes (and they've incresed, because the land is residential). He calls the developer.

The developer now offers him $250 thousand, and that's his final offer.

The joys of local govenment ...

As far as the question about a "full citizen", everyone born in this country, or naturalised, is a full citizen. However, there are age requirements for voting and th holding of public office (example, the President must be 35, and a US Senator must be 30). Certain public offices require degrees, such as county coroner or engineering positions.

Even though it is not written in the U.S. Constitution, this concept of a “full citizen” is a legal reality. When it comes to minors, it is related to the legal definition of age of consent. Children born in the U.S. are considered U.S. citizens, but they do not enjoy the same rights and responsibilities that adult citizens have. They cannot vote. They cannot be called to fight for their country. They experience limited freedom of speech at public schools.

There are also numerous laws against youth that would be unconstitutional if they tried to pass them for adults such as curfews and mandatory alcohol tests.

In the case of foreigners, legal authorities treat legal immigrants with many of the same civil rights that are granted to citizens. The U.S. doesn’t have to do that, but they do anyway, although it is a legal gray area.

Minors nonetheless enjoy full citizenship, it is merely the case that caveats are placed open that by law. My only quibble with what you said was the notion of 2nd class citizenship. People are a citizen or they are not a citizen. Law is able to supercede citizenship, since the latter is a manifestation of the former.

On the issue of unconstitutionality, I have no doubt that were people truly bothered about the issue, the laws could be treated as the basically unconstitutional matters that they are.

How much electoral accountability is there in US local government?

To answer your question, there's supposed to be quite a bit of electoral accountability. That's the ideal. In reality, US local government always seems to be something of an oligarchy.

Take the City of Chicago, for example ... please ...

There isn't a single non-Democrat on the City Council, the mayor's office is held by a mayor-for-life, the mayor hand-picks his municipal judges, and under it all, the city is dominated by the oppressive hand of the mob. The mob applies the muscle to anyone who dissents, and are protected by the judges.

When Mayor Daley was "elected" to his 5th Term in office (he didn't campaign a single day), the inaugural was held at the City Council Room. Daley walks in, takes his oath of office, and everyone starts applauding ... it went on forever, seemingly. When I saw this scene, it reminded me of Stalin and the Central Committee meeting, with everyone applauding, and Stalin looking around for the people who stopped! Daley and Stalin would have gotten along quite well, I'm sure (come to think of it, one of them would have whacked the other).

Meigs Field was one of the most well-known local airports in the world. It was situated by Lake Michigan, with the Merchandise Mart to the west. Heck, it was the starting-point for Microsoft's Flight Sim, it was so well-known. Daley wanted it for a "people's park". The airport people said no, and thousands of businessmen who used it each year joined in on the bandwagon.

So, one night, Daley had City work crews with bulldozers move onto the airport, and they tore up the runway. This was a violation of Federal law, but nothing ever came of it. Who wants the Godfather mad at them, right? Even the President ...

I'm waiting for Daley to win his 6th term with 100% of the vote. No accountability would be the proper answer to your question ...

And I thought local governmental impotence was a bad idea...

What I've seen so far as regards US governmental problems, federal or local, seems to indicate that it's an endemic issue that the US is going to have to put up with. Short of a serious constitutional rethink of local and state government, it seems to be as unavoidable as political apathy is in UK local government.

Endemic is a good word. So is systemic.

As a Federalist, I call for a strong ... but not necessarily large or unduly intrusive ... federal government, capable of dealing with the wrongs that happen on the State level. However, local issues are just that ... local. Only the state governments have the right to intervene, and the locality will be protected by local state legislators who can be counted on to block aggressive action by the State government.

I sense that you are making a subtle argument here. Let me paraphrase what you are saying:

1. Minors have full citizenship.
2. There are legal caveats on their full citizenship of minors.

I don't know what you mean by "caveats." If this means restrictions on their rights and responsibilities, how is this any different from what I said?

The U.S. constitution does describe different levels of citizenship though. A naturalized citizen cannot run for president, for example. The Constitution also says that no one under the age of 35 can become President of the U.S. And U.S. laws allow stripping away the citizenship of a foreign-born adult under the right circumstances. None of these, though, would I say are second-class citizens. They enjoy 99.9% of citizen’s rights, which really means they are “full citizens” for all practical reasons.

Mind you that I am not putting down the U.S.. As far as I know, every country in the world has a similar scheme when it comes to their citizenship.

Yet I still have the impression that I missed something in your argument. So I will be waiting for further clarification from you.

There are always people who are bothered by this, but most adults aren't. Since minors don't have the money to take these laws to the Supreme Court, they just have to live by them.

What I was trying to say is that we need to appreciate just what a 'citizen' is. There are two aspects, one being that the holder of citizenship takes on legal rights, the other being a sense of nationality as it were.

I only really took issue with the idea of someone not being 'a full citizen', since 'citizen' in the modern sense simply means people living in or 'belonging' to a country. As such, there are not grades or levels of citizenship.

However, since the 'rights' of citizenship are nothing but a creation of the legal system, we can restrict certain 'rights' by law. This does not stop the individual being a citizen, it merely takes away some of the percieved 'rights' that being a citizen is commonly taken to entail.

I hope the above makes sense, though I have a suspicion I may have almost lapsed into legal-speak.

I will agree that it is a subtle argument, but I think it is important that we recognise what citizenship actually entails in both the literal and the legal sense.

Profiler,

I think that we are really saying the same thing, although phrased differently: there are restrictions on the legal rights of certain classes of citizens.

I wil respectfully disagree about your position on citizenship. Citizenship means more than just "living or belonging" to a country in the U.S. This is especially the case when there is a clash between state law braking constitutional civil rights. Also, the issue of citizenship is playing a big role on how much the Bill of Rights applies to foreign terrorists detained in the U.S.

Both the examples you give illustrate what I mean when I say that the rights entailed by citizenship are merely legal creations. The US constitution, the EU human rights act, they are both legal documents that (amongst other points for the constitution) lay out a specific legal interpretation of citizenship, there are no 'classes' of citizens, merely differences in the way the legal rights are defined (as you yourself said above).

As I said before, citizenship simply means belonging to a nation/country/etc. It is simply a case of what laws we chose to apply to citizenship. Those rights are not inviolable, the legal rights entailed by citizenship could (in theory) be abolised, it is simply modern convention that we assume certain laws to be essential, while restricting other legal freedoms.