Let’s change the rules

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

It seems as though every time we turn around, the Democrats want to change the rules (or the Constitution). The Constitution has served us pretty well up until the last 60 or so years.  

So, let’s say it worked pretty well from 1788 (year of ratification) until Johnson’s “War on Poverty” declaration in 1964 – 176 years. The last 60 years has been downhill.  

Thomas Sowell has some comments on what has happened to blacks in these last 60 years:

“Nearly 100 years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children [78%] being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But 30 years after the liberal welfare state, found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent [66%]. Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell-holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there. If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about.”
– Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

So, let’s change the rules.  

For voter ID, I don’t just want identification, I want you to bring your tax return to show you are paying taxes. No evidence of paying taxes, you can’t vote.  

Why should freeloaders get to vote? You can’t go to a Taylor Swift concert without a ticket. Why should you be allowed to participate in our government without “buying a ticket” – paying your tax bill?

Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and others were opposed to government employees (at any level) belonging to unions.  They saw this as a conflict of interest – if government employees were unionized, their union leaders could instruct them to vote in a way beneficial to the union. We’ve lost this, too.

We have reached a point where the people suffering the pain (taxpayers) are being ignored for the benefit of all others.  

Time to swing the pendulum back the other way. We can’t take it any  longer.

Remember this when you vote, at any level.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.