Quote Originally Posted by Lady's Human
But you DO have a voice in what your municipal taxes go toward!

I have yet to vote against a school budget increase. (oops, one exception. I DID vote against a new school in the town we used to live in.......mainly because the town had JUST finished renovating the school that the new school has replaced. I have something against a town paying $40 million to renovate a school to have the school board ask for another increase 6 months later to tear the whole thing down and build new)

I also wouldn't have an issue with something like this is it was voted on by the general public in an election.

A tad off topic, but.......

If you don't like what your rep in DC is doing, vote them out of office! People can't be too upset with what's going on in DC because last time I checked the re-election rate was still north of 80%
National elections are a joke....the electoral college is outdated and probably still in place so we voters have less power. I believe in some states, the college can actually vote for a different candidate than the one that gets the most votes. The last presidential election was an example of when my vote counted for nothing. I did not vote for Bush, but slightly more people in my state at the time did, so it went for Bush, therefore rendering my vote useless.

If we had a true democracy instead of a republic I would be more inclined to think voting actually works. In small elections, yes, you can make a difference. Perhaps that is even where it counts most. But in large scale elections I am beginning to think we are making nothing more than a statement by going to the polls, because in 2000 Gore won the popular vote but lost the election most likely due to shady polls activity (yet we are supposed to be ruled by majority- even if there wasn't any suspicious activity, he should still have won due to popular vote) and in 2000 it was pretty much the same thing all over again except Kerry didn't get the popular vote (most likely because all of the people waiting at the polls for hours because they were too poor to take off work to vote so they couldn't cast one).

I wish I could believe that if everyone really cared enough to vote (most people do not care or even know what is going on, so that is probably why the same people keep getting re-elected) we could change our country for the better. But I really don't believe that anymore, because all the evidence I've seen points to the contrary.