Harder For the Poor

I had no idea it was that hard to get one of those state ID cards, so I guess you're right about that part. Nevertheless, if you move a lot and your life is messy, it seems like you would want to have one of those things. Nowadays people are always asking you to show some kind of ID for one thing or another. It wasn't always like that, neither my hypothetical wife nor I remember having to jump through hoops to get our first driver's licenses, or to register to vote either. I suppose it started getting like this because of 9-11.

Secretary of State offices, on the other hand, are conveniently located all over Michigan. They don't have them way out in the boonies, but Cheboygan has one, and it's only a city of 5,000 population. People who live in the country might have to drive 20 miles or so to get there, but they have to do that anyway to shop for groceries and other essentials. I don't know why you couldn't find one on the internet, but a lot of people would look in their local phone book before trying that.

Okay, voting is harder for the poor people, but so is everything else. The only way to remedy that is to provide opportunities for the poor to climb out of poverty. Decades of experience have shown that just giving them handouts won't do it, they need decent jobs and, for that, they need a decent education. They are unlikely to get either one without a motivational work ethic, which they apparently aren't getting from their local subculture. I don't know how to fix that, but it seems that somebody should already be working on it. I hear a lot of crying lately about the government being broke. Well, rich people pay more taxes than poor people, so it seems like they should be doing everything they can to help us all get rich. Same thing with the general economy. Last I heard, consumer spending accounts for 70% of the economic activity in this country, and I'm sure that rich people consume more than poor people. So why don't they make us all rich? It would be better for everybody.

I'm not sure when this voter ID law was passed in Michigan, but it's been in place for at least the last two or three elections. This means you can't pin it on the Republicans. Our Republican governor has been  in office less than four years, and we had a Democrat in that office for eight years before that. The Republicans have only had a majority in our state legislature for the same amount of time as they had the governorship, before that, the Democrats dominated at least one house for as long as I can remember. I don't know how much voter fraud they had in Michigan before the ID law was passed, but I'm sure it was not nearly as much as they had in Chicago when we were kids and Mayor Daley was in charge. I also don't know if the ID law has made any improvement in that regard. It seems like it would be hard to document something like that, the only ones you'd know about would be the ones that got caught.

Like I said before, the best way to limit political campaign spending would be to ban all political advertising from television. I'm sure that's where most of the money goes, and nobody likes seeing that crap on TV anyway. I don't think this has anything to do with freedom of speech, television is not speech, it's just television. I think there's still a rule that they have to give all the politicians equal time, well if they all got zero time, they would all have equal time. They don't allow cigarette advertising  on TV, and politicians certainly generate more hot air than cigarettes do. If secondary smoke is bad for you, can secondary bull shit be any better?