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Over three-fourths of Americans think there should be a maximum age limit for elected officials, according to a CBS News/YouGov survey.

    • Kalcifer@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year ago

      You mean like how most places don’t let you vote before you turn 18 because it is accepted that children have not developed the cognitive ability to make sound decisions in regards to electing officials?

      This is a strawman argument. OP was talking about an age limit for elected officials, whereas you are now talking about age restrictions on the voters. Yes, we are both talking about cognitive decline in decision making; however there is a substantial difference between putting an age limit on those who can be in power vs. putting an age limit on those who can decide who is in power.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      I think once you get over 80 it is time to step aside and let the world move forward.

      I don’t necessarily disagree, but how do we prevent this logic from being used to disenfranchise voters above the max age? If they’re not sharp enough to make decisions in the government, how are they sharp enough to vote?

      I see two options, if we’re going to have limits on serving in Congress. One, they maintain the right to vote for the same reason 18 year olds do – they’re legally considered adults, and they deserve a say in matters that affect them, like wars. Two, people above the age can’t vote, but no law which passes can affect their day to day. They wouldn’t need to pay taxes, social security and Medicare payments would be guaranteed to not go down for them, and they generally aren’t held as autonomous adults in legal matters.

      This is a can of worms, and needs to be carefully handled.

    • aidan@lemmy.worldM
      1524·
      1 year ago

      There are plenty of perfectly capable and intelligent people until the day they die. People are individuals not the average of their demography.

        • aidan@lemmy.worldM
          43·
          1 year ago

          I agree, I oppose a minimum age on holding office as well.

          You can’t have laws that are based on individuals, they have to be broad by definition or else they are unenforceable or they are oppressive towards certain groups.

          Yes you can and do, thats why courts exist

          Demographics, like most things are a bell curve and most of us are no more than one standard deviation from the mean.

          Any bell curve across hundreds of millions of people has hundreds of thousands to millions of outliers.

          Also the average of a demographic is exactly that. The average. To suggest that no-one is the average is either nieve or disingenuous.

          Basically no one is average across a sufficiently large number of discriminators.

      • talkstothecat@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        For me, the main issue isn’t the increased risk of cognitive decline, it’s the fact that I share very few life experiences with people born before the invention of color tv, and someone who has another 5-15 years left will be less impacted by policy decisions than someone who’s going to be around for another 50-60 years. Octogenarians are not representative of the majority of the population and, in a representative democracy, I think that is important consideration.