Divided America: Diverse millennials are no voting monolith

Can't really blame them. The American political system is an absolute mess.

But that said, mess or not, it's what it is. Sometimes to change a system you have to participate in that system first.

It is a pretty good time in history to give up American citizenship.

It is a pretty good time in history to give up American citizenship

... and become a citizen of which country?

.

I really dislike the way in which the voting public are sliced and diced by race, by age, by affluence etc etc. no wonder the country is divided.

America is divided because the easiest way to control a large population of people is to divide them into factions. Republican and democrat politicians use a mixture of facts, falsehoods, fears, and fabrications to divide the people into two opposing sides. Each side is manipulated into believing that the opposing side will take away it's rights and privileges, or grant rights and privileges that the other side opposes.

"Divide and conquer" is one of the oldest strategies in politics, and most people have heard the term at one time or another. But few people seem to realize that they are pawns in this strategy, and that they are used and manipulated, or discarded when they are no longer useful. While the people are being manipulated into screaming at each other, the manipulators are picking their pockets. Despite being a tool of tyrants for thousands of years, people nowadays are as easily manipulated as people were in the stone age.

How well does it work? The article above is a good example of how effective it is. In the next election, the great majority of people will vote along party lines. They are so conditioned to believe a particular way, they would never think of voting or supporting someone who is not a member of their party. Simply put, they are sheep, and are as stupid and helpless as sheep can be.

Ironically enough, those in power who do the dividing have no real belief in the party system at all, other than as a tool of control, or getting them elected. Your typical school teacher or garage mechanic will go to his or her grave as a republican or democrat. But your typical politician can change his or her party affiliation as easily as he or she can change their coat. Look at Lieberman, Chafee, Rick Perry, Spector, Byrd, Bloomberg or Thurmond, and you can add Reagan and even Trump to that list. As a teen, even Hillary was a republican. And then there is the democrat party's new messiah, Elizabeth Warren, who was a republican for most of her life.

America is divided because that is the intention of those who run the country.

I hear many millennials complain of how the boomers were negligent when voting during their lifetime, yet I see none of them effectively voting for the change they want.

As they and "Gen X" are of voting age and have been for a few years now, and now outnumber the boomers, I love pointing this out to the complainers and reminding them that every generation has to deal with those who are always voting against everyone's best interest.

And as sengetsu03 pointed out, keeping the American voters divided is how the ruling class maintains control.

and become a citizen of which country?

New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg. Most of these have or are getting a higher standard of living than in the US.

Agree with bruinfan. Any country in the Visa Waiver program would work. The US is the only country in the world , that I know of , that requires its citizens living abroad to file a income tax return. Total BS and another good reason to bail on US citizenship.

America’s oldest millennials — nearing 20 when airplanes slammed into New York City’s Twin Towers — are old enough to remember the relative economic prosperity of the 1990s, and when a different Clinton was running for president. The nation’s youngest adults — now nearing 20 themselves — find it hard to recall a reality without terrorism and economic worry.

Should that not read America's 'youngest' millennials - nearing 20...? Otherwise I fear my beer goggles have got the best of me.

Meh. Trump (the Republican party) is driving them towards the Democrats. Guys like Sanders is the future of the Democratic party.

And America.

Yup, damn beer goggles got me again as I tried to read this before dozing off last night...

It's just too bad the Yanks don't have a third option system. At least they did get one thing sort of right, no dynasty terms. Two and you're out, funny that, since their past time sport requires three strikes.

At least they did get one thing sort of right, no dynasty terms.

Not quite. We had three terms of Bush, and now it looks as though some people want three or more terms of Clinton. It is a sad state of affairs when the most influential thing a candidate has is a name. But you can never underestimate the stupidity of voters, and in political matters, the level of one's education is irrelevant. The poorer classes sell their votes for handouts, the more educated sell there votes in exchange for lies, because they simply can't comprehend the depth to which politicians will sink to acquire power and wealth. When one becomes a member of a party, one tends to believe what that party tells them, no matter how absurd.

People have an innate desire to believe in something greater than themselves, and the smartest among them can be made to believe the most ludicrous things if it seems to satisfy this desire.

Black Sabbath

Meh. Trump (the Republican party) is driving them towards the Democrats. Guys like Sanders is the future of the Democratic party.

And America.

Colonel Sanders died 20 years ago. Hardly the future, is it?

Meh. Trump (the Republican party) is driving them towards the Democrats. Guys like Sanders is the future of the Democratic party.

Trump is as republican as I am Martian. And Sanders is not the future of anything, he is the face of modern politics. He plays the Robin Hood strategy as well as any politician of the last 2 centuries, promising to tax the rich to support the poor. Being that the top 20% of wage earners already pay 85% of all tax collected in America, the bottom 40% effectively pay no tax at all, it is hard to tell people with a straight face that the rich aren't paying their fair share. But Bernie is a pathological liar, like any other politician, republican or democrat.

Publicly, Bernie Sanders says they must pay more. But he knows better than anyone else that it can't possibly work. As lifetime politician, Sanders knows that rule number one is tell the people what they want to hear. And he also knows that nobody wants to hear the truth.

What happens if Sanders does what he promises? What if he actually raised taxes on the rich, and gave them to the poor? Since the top 20% of wage earners employ more than half of all Americans, and account for more than one-third of domestic consumption, they will compensate for the tax by raising the cost of their goods and services, reducing wages and benefits to the tens of millions of Americans they employ, and consume less themselves, meaning that the companies which produce the things the rich consume will sell less, and as a result, they will pay their own workers less.

In the end, the poor will at best be no better off than they were before, and most likely they will be worse off. You cannot restrict the effect of a tax on any particular group, taxes on the rich are immediately transferred to the poor, and taxes on the poor are immediately transferred to the rich. Sanders knows this as clearly as he knows what day of the week it is. But most Americans or any other people don't. This is fundamental economics, but as I said earlier, people want politicians to tell them what they want to hear, which is seldom the truth.

The only party which benefits by tax increases are the politicians, because they can create loopholes to the tax in order to squeeze campaign contributions and/or favors out of the rich. Why do think the tax code now has more than 74,000 pages (nearly 190 times as many as it did one hundred years ago)? And that is just the federal tax code, each of the 50 states has it's own myriad rules and regulations which must be added. Bernie has been in office since 1968, and he is one of those responsible for a great deal of the tens of thousands of pages added during his career.