Drunken Voting

I suspect that most people believe that the reason bars and liquor stores are closed on election day is because the government doesn’t want to have people voting while they are drunk. Actually, the reason has to do with a law against “buying votes,” because politicians used to get people to come to the polls by buying them drinks when they did so. They assumption was that the voter would vote for whoever bought them the drink which brought them to the voting booth.

It’s still illegal to buy votes, but only if the politician uses his own money or campaign funds. It’s perfectly legal to buy votes with taxpayer money, such as by promising jobs or government programs, which Democrats got to first with their promise of “a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot,” along with FDR’s “New Deal.”

In this election Democrats have gone completely nuts with buying votes using taxpayer money. Kamela Harris and several others are offering “reparations” for the “victims of slavery” which ended more than 150 years ago and of which there are no longer any living victims.

Elizabeth Warren has added reparations for “Native Americans” who had their land stolen, perhaps unaware that we’ve already done that by allowing them to legally steal money from the white man in their casinos. She also wants to provide reparations to same sex couples who overpaid taxes because they weren’t allowed to get married, because the only reason for getting married is to pay lower taxes.

Most of the Democratic candidates want to cancel most or all student loans because… Well, they don’t really say why other than that repaying the loans is hard. They don’t claim that the loans were imposed against the will of the persons who took them on, and they don’t claim that the college educations were not delivered.

They’ve apparently given up on cancelling home mortgages, which was all the rage in the 2016 election. For some reason they don’t want to cancel or pay off any credit card debt, and they are rigorously trying to pretend that debt due to medical expenses does not exist. They are just hot to trot on student loans.

Andrew Yang is a “direct buy” guy; he wants to just give $1000/month cash to every man, woman and child, $12,000 per year, cash on the barrelhead with no strings attached, for doing nothing. That would be an illegal buying of votes, except that he’s promising taxpayer money, not his own. It's money taken from people who do work for a living and given to people who don't work for a living. To be fair, it's paid to everyone, so it's also given back to people who do work for a living, which is confusing but seems to make sense to Andrew.

Cory Booker is a bit of a piker compared to that, he just wants to give a $5000 one-time payment to each person at time of birth. He calls it “baby bonds” and says that money, if invested in the stock market, could be worth $50,000 when the kid is 18 years old. It could also be worth about 50 cents, but even if he’s right, how far does $50,000 go?

Maybe it would be better to open the bars and let people vote while drunk.