Who Should Vote?

Before I get into this issue, I would first like you to watch the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1KOBMg1Y8  Now that's done, I will try and touch on my opinions of who should vote. This is a really tough topic for me because I feel strongly that people who vote and are making a decision on who should run our country should be educated enough to make a wise decision. That being said my ideologies on voting are not very rational and would never actually be the set ways that we vote, unfortunately.  So here goes nothing! First, I think that there should be a mandated test voters must take to become registered voters. If you think about it, if you have some whoha who cannot make logical decisions in their own life, why do we want them making decisions for our country. The test would not be something like the SAT obviously, but it would be something more like the GED. I understand that would never work so maybe we could just make it a law that to vote you must have graduated from high-school or have passed the GED. Secondly, the voter must not collect benefits from the government due to pure laziness. This is what gets under my skin the most. To collect welfare and benefits (not including legal disability) such as unemployment there must be documentation that these people qualify. So for unemployment, I know in Florida, they just started a system in which if you are receiving unemployment then you must provide documentation weekly that you are applying for jobs. The only way a person can be a registered voter ( in my system) and not have passed high-school or the GED test, is if they are currently employed or have been employed recently and are paying taxes. For welfare, that in itself is another story. What we need to do is implement a system that prohibits the families who keep spitting out kids to collect more welfare while they are sitting on their asses to not be able to vote. Obviously they have a mindset that they deserve something from the government while other people are out working and paying taxes to support these leaches. I really could go on for days about who should be allowed to vote, but seeing how my views are "radical" and would never be implemented into the system, I am going to end there.

Debate #1

Overall, I believe that the debate went pretty good for the first one. I was on the pro side of supra nationalism so obviously I thought that we had the better argument and presented it better. The reason I say that was it seemed that the con side was contradicting themselves in some of the things they said. Some points that they would make would be points providing evidence for our side. Our main points were: less border control/ controversy, small economies working together, security of smaller countries, and allocating resources. I liked the way the debate was set up, but I wish there was more room for debate instead of just saying  your point then have the other side say something about it, then back to you. If there was room for actual back and forth without it having to be so organized, I feel that it may of been a little better. I do understand that it has to be organized that way or else it may get out of hand. The con side had a few good points, such as when they talked about if one country had a resource then why should they have to share it if they are in this supranationalism type of system. I believe that we made a good point back to that when we said that some our going to gain and some are going to loose, but that is just part of. The fact that they made statements about people loosing their cultural identity did not help the much. One of the girls used examples from different tribes and saying that one got tvs and it just made things go downhill. Well if they did not want these new technologies, they wouldn't have got them. I beleive that if you go to one of the tribes they are talking about and let them live in an American home for a month, they would say there is no way I am going back to where I came from. They would probably tell there relatives to come over and live with them. That's one of the points that I think the con side failed on. Overall, the debate went well and I enjoyed participating in it.

Merits of Supranationalism

This weeks blog post was on supranationalism. I found supranationalism to be a very interesting topic. In my own personal opinion I believe that seeing how we are already such a globalized world supranationalism is not too far away. The reason I think this way is because the merits of supranationalism far outweigh the negatives. If you take for example the problems we face daily here in the United States about border control then it is a good example of why we should go to this supranationalistic way of going about things. We as tax payers are paying money for the government to spend on protecting our borders. I looked it up and it is millions of dollars per year in many different sectors of border and immigration control that we are spending. People bring up the idea that with supranationalism, the people begin to loose their cultural identity and such, but saying that there is not borders does not mean that people cannot still have there cultural identity. What it means is that there will be less regulation. So say we have people that can now come over from Mexico legally. These people will most likely move into an area with a population that is similar to what they are. Therefore, the cultural identity is still very strong within that group of people. This idea of supranationalism is also good because we can have a better distribution of resources. If there are 5 major "countries" then the resources that would be in just one country, such as oil in the middle east area, would now be spread out over many countries in this supranationalistic region. Not only would this be one of the major pluses, but also the idea of joint military would be a good idea because now instead of having hundreds of militarys fighting against each other, we would be one large military. The best point that I saw in all of these was about the economies. If countries with smaller economies can come together to form one large one, then they will be able to compete with the larger ones.