People on the dole are not necessarily people who have never paid taxes. I'm not referring to things like gasoline/tobacco/sales taxes, but federal/state/local income tax. First of all, in many localities, like, oh, MINE, if you have income, you pay city income tax. I haven't paid federal income tax since my first kid was born, but I've paid income taxes every year. And yeah, I'm on the dole.
More on property ownership:
By "property owner" do you mean free and clear? Damn, if you think we spend too much on social security now, just wait until only people who own land free and clear get to vote! By the way, a whole lot of older folks who own property free and clear are on the dole, not only social security, which I think most of us probably don't consider welfare/"on the dole" in quite the same sense as other entitlements, but also medicaid, food stamps, and other low-income programs.
Or do you mean any yahoo who managed to get a mortgage? This could have a salutary effect of increasing the voting power of "fly-over country" but would also further encourage irresponsible borrowing. If my vote depended on it, I would have gotten a mortgage back a few years ago. And you can bet I'd be in foreclosure now. Maybe I'm weird, but voting is that important to me that I would have borrowed--irresponsibly--in order to be able to do it. I suspect I'm not entirely alone in that.
And then there's the 800 pound gorilla. Maybe not so much here, but in any major national debate, race invariably comes up. Black people are on the whole poorer than white people. Poorer people should not own land in the same proportions as wealthier people (still presuming we're talking about mortgaged land here--for free-and-clear it's no longer "should" but "don't"); as much as I am not a fan of the "first black president" I'm not ok with taking away the vote from a larger proportion of black people. Like most of the black people I interact with regularly, I'm opposed to a lot of stuff in black culture, but lower levels of land ownership ain't on the list.
Nor should any of us, witnessing as we are, the collapse of an economy built on bad mortgages, be interested in not only perpetuating but in fact strengthening the government sanctioning of our cultural belief that owning real estate somehow makes one a better person. It doesn't. Perhaps staking a claim and building a homestead out of sod and sweat did, but getting an FHA mortgage with 3% down just doesn't. Heck, getting a traditional mortgage might mean one knows how to save, but not getting such a mortgage doesn't mean one doesn't know how to save: it may just mean that one is more interested in starting a business, going to school, starting a family, taking care of one's parents, getting medical treatment for a serious/chronic illness, or any number of other things.
Personally, after having lived in and maintained a house for the past several years, I'm hoping to rent for a good long while, possible permanently. Houses are a whole lot of work, and I've got enough work to do, thank-you-very-much.
Finally, to get all environmentalist, I'm not in favor of government regulation that encourages people to take up more space than they otherwise would. I've got nothing against suburban America, and think that we are handling each environmental impact issue of that mode of living as it arises to the best of our ability (e.g. sharpshooters in county parks reducing suburban deer herds to manageable levels; HOA's on waterfront property banning fertilizer use to preserve local water quality; similar local efforts). I do, however, have a big problem with taking people who would be perfectly content to live in a 1500 square foot apartment and using the right to vote a way of pressuring them to own a house and yard and subsequent rise in spending and consumption of all kinds of resources, natural and otherwise. Fine, we live in a consumer society. I prefer to classify myself in a less locust-like way, but hey, that's the model we are built on. And it's working so well.....
No, owning real property should not be a basis for voting rights. At all. [I also don't think it should be a basis for calculating school taxes; but then I think we should shift all the taxes currently used for public education to public health. Shift education to the private sector and health to the public sector. Seems a nifty way of handling the health care question with raising taxes to insane(r) levels and address the issue of excessive government interference in private life by giving people back their kids while shifting some control of health care away from corporate decision-makers to government decision-makers, but then I digress...
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As for limited participation in local elections for non-citizens: yah sure, I think it would be ok to waive in some non-citizen immigrants. Logistically, it would simply involve an amended ballot; have one of the little old ladies who run the polling places black out the sections of the ballot that pertain to non-local issues. Waiving in should be on an individual basis, and the applicant should have to demonstrate some reason why he is not a citizen: financial hardship could be ok, as could other reasons like multinational employment, etc.
One of the local rabbis in the Detroit Jewish community became a citizen something like forty years after immigrating to the US. No reason; it just wasn't a priority. They weren't well off, but they could have scraped the money together at some point in that forty years. I suspect that kind of thin may be more common in various kinds of fundamentalist communities, where, as in that community, members don't think of themselves as Americans. Heck, I was openly criticized in middle school for self-identifying as American, because "Jews in Germany thought they were Germans, until the Holocaust; we're just Jews, first and last." That may have been true of German Jews, but that attitude should be discouraged by American governmental units, even local ones. If someone considers himself so much a (fill-in-ethnicity-here) that he can't be bothered to become an American, then allowing him to vote is simply giving away the farm.
