Posted by
John Caile on Thursday, December 03, 2009 11:23:57 AM
The recent Pew Research political awareness quiz raises some troubling questions:
http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php
The test consists of 12 questions about current events, from identifying the most recent Supreme Court appointee to what the "Cap and trade" bill deals with. In other words, things that one would hope most people would know.
In general, Republicans did better than Democrats, men did better than women, and older people did better than younger participants. But the details of the results are disturbing, to say the least - 44% of the population got only 4 (or less) correct, and 21% (that's 1 in 5 people) got only TWO questions right!
While 65% of respondents correctly identified Sonya Sotomayor as the newest Supreme Court, the scores on certain key questions are more frightening.
25% do not know that Democrats control the House of Representatives. (Think about that - 1 in 4 people think Republicans are in charge, even though Democrats have had the majority since 2006).
44% do not know that the "public option" (in the news practically every day) is the term for government run health insurance.
47% do not know what the unemployment rate is (10%) even though the choices were 5, 10, 15, and 20% (and despite the fact that the unemployment rate has been in the news every day for almost a year).
67% do not know the current Dow Jones average (not even close).
And perhaps the most disturbing of all:
87% do not even know what the "Cap and Trade" bill is, let alone that its phony "carbon offset" scheme will cost more than a TRILLION dollars, and likely destroy the U.S. economy, affecting every American.
And these people are allowed to
VOTE?
Now, one could be tempted to blame this sort of ignorance on the bias in the mainstream media. And certainly, much of the lack of awareness is indeed the result of "selective" reporting by news organizations who "pump up" stories that bolster their political views (the New York Times putting the silly Abu Ghraib "controversy" on the front page for 44 days), while burying "inconvenient" stories like "Climate-gate" - the recent discovery of e-mails exposing the lies and deception behind the "Global Warming" fraud.
But with the enormous number of new resources available to anyone who cares to look (from the Internet to Talk Radio to the explosion of "blogs") no one really has an excuse for not knowing what should be just basic facts about what is going on in the world. There is a reason that people who watch FOX news are far more informed than those who get their news from ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN.
Not to mention the (rapidly declining) number of people who watch the off-the-deep-end MSNBC (popular in the "crafts room" at the local asylum) and the 35% of (predominantly liberal) young people who get their "news" from The John Stewart Show - these folks are utterly clueless.
All of which begs the question: Should people who can't even answer simple questions about current events be allowed to vote?
Remember, when people vote, they have an affect on all of us. We already have half of the people paying almost no income tax, yet receiving enormous amounts of money from the other half who pay the lion's share (97%) of the taxes. And these perennial free-loaders invariably vote for socialist thieves who take more and more of what productive people earn and destroy our economic system in the process - just look at what Obama and his neo-Marxist colleagues in the Congress have already done in less than a year.
The truth is, the right to vote carries with it an implicit responsibility to actually have a smattering of knowledge about the issues that are at stake. A basic test could easily be created that is non-partisan and non-discriminatory (and in English, please - if you don't even speak the language, you do NOT deserve to vote).
After all, we require that you pass a test just to get a driver's license - surely it would not be out of line to require that you pass a simple quiz on current events before you get to help decide who our next Senator, Governor, or President is going to be.
But just as they oppose any and every Positive Voter I.D. effort, Democrats would fight such a test, tooth and nail. They have to - because an informed electorate would eventually lead to the death of the Democrat Party.