Sixteen Year Olds Should Be Able to Vote.

“it is suppos’d an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro’ their Representatives.”- Benjamin Franklin. Or to put it a more familiar way “No taxation without representation”. This was the rallying cry of American colonists during the lead-up to the American revolution. It’s a belief that is essential to the American experience. Unfortunately for a large part of America population it not a reality.

Right now in the United States the minimum voting age is 18, in every state, in every election. At surfacer value that makes sense, 18 is when you become a legal adult, it is when you are allowed to join the military, drop out of school, buy cigarettes, have sex, etc. However it is not when you begin to pay taxes.

According to the Department of Labor as of July 2019 there are currently 21.2 million employed youth workers. Many of those are under the age of 18. Every week millions of teenagers get money taken out of their paychecks to go to a federal budget that they had no influence. Unlike me (a 25 year old man), they are not able to vote for their mayor, their congressional representatives, their governor, and of course their president. Yet these elected officials are able to take their money and use it as they please. This is thoroughly un-American. So that leaves us two options, we can either forbid those that are under the age of 18 from working (which is stupid and wrong) or we can do the right thing and allow these people to have a say in what happens with their money. If no taxation without representation is a radical idea in America then we are in a very very bad place.