[ajsnigrutin]

This sentiment is pretty popular amongst some of the younger working people... they work, pay a lot of taxes for everything, and then get outvoted by pensioners who retired under "old" laws and now get a higher pension than they ever earned while working (i'm talking from a position of government pensions, not the american save-for-yourself style). So, old people vote and decide, and young people get the bill for that.

eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...

The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.

Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.

[everforward]

My phrasing of it is that democracy is underpinned by a shared belief in a collective destiny. If we all vote well, we all do well together and if we vote poorly then we all do poorly together, on average.

Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.

They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.

I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.

I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.

It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.