I have come to the conclusion that young people today believe the older generation have made a mess of looking after the planet (“Up and counting”, October 7). I believe they are correct.
My proposal to amend the voting age: at 16, you get one vote; at 26 you get 0.9 of a vote; at 36 you get 0.8 of a vote; at 46, you get 0.7 of a vote, and so on, until by the time you are 80 or so you don’t get much of a vote at all.
Boomers will slap their foreheads and ask, “Why? What madness is this?” My contention is that 16-yearolds have to live with the consequences of political decisions the longest, and therefore should have the greatest say. At my age, 68, there is not a lot of time left to feel the consequences, and voting tends to be self-serving and myopic. Add to this the difficulty of older people adopting new concepts and technologies and you can see how the young become disengaged from a political system that almost completely ignores them.
