Youth Rights

Thank you for actually reading all that, I didn't think anyone would :) Sorry if my post in any way seemed rude or attacking, I certainly don't want to give that impression :) First of you must understand that this is mostly theoretical. The system I layed out would be ridiculous, but I'm trying to help you understand the basic, basic, basic format. The ideas appear concrete because they feature concrete examples, but the examples themselves are not necessarily part of my argument, meaning that them being dumb does not disprove my overall thesis. By the way, either you are a great guesser or you actually took the time to do the math because my estimates for such costs (the direct costs, not net total) of this money system would be ~7 billion dollars :) (~211,000,000[us population]x.237[%U18 population]x100[money]=7.2 billion) This makes it seem absurdly expensive at first, but not when put in context. $100 dollars would be, and I am not exaggerating at all, literally .001666 of a percent of the average us income. ($100/$60,000[us mean income, which is better than median in this case. If you want to know my explanation then ask for it, but otherwise I will assume you understand.]=~.0017) This means it would be less than one fifth of one percent of the mean income for the united states. If I were right, and I understand you think I am wrong, but if I am correct we would be giving people the ability to prove themselves and earn rights for .0017 percent of our income. That is not as big of a deal as it would appear to be. When you say "give" you are implying that their time is worthless, but it is not. The amount of money I proposed "giving" them would be a tiny, microscopic, incomparable fraction of what adults receive for jury duty, which is still a ridiculously small amount of money relative to the time spent there. Imagine if you had jury duty 5 days a week every year for eighteen years, but received zero dollars in return. What you say about the books and money collected would be true, but my method would allow mature minors to get jobs earlier in their life so they could make more money. Its not really about the money collected from the annual $100, but I still see your point. You could argue that jury duty is different because it helps the economy, but, in the long run, education does so as well. I feel like you are forgetting some of the criteria previously established (thats understandable considering the poor organization of my previous post) as a prerequisite to gain a right: "Driver's licenses to those who pass school and can hold a job (to show they are responsible). NO!!!!!... Oh I forgot to mention, those kids who would fit your criteria of responsible, were HIGH the whole time." -You must remember that one of the criteria for a driver's license before 16 was "following the law". Being high is not "following the law." You may ask "How would we regulate this if so many kids use drugs today and don't get caught." The reason they are not caught is because they have freedom of privacy (at least from police officers randomly going through their stuff without a permit), but if they are willing to give up this right in order to gain more, then the more power to them. Maybe randomized drug tests, idk. Regardless of the method there would be some way to analyze this if the minor is willing. The only critique you could give of this is to critique my examples, but, like I said before, there are so many methods of regulating this that one could surely be put in place and there is no issue of privacy invasion because it (trying to gain more rights) would be voluntary. Much of your argument is based on isolated examples, regardless of whether or not they are hypothetic or real: "Just last week I knew a guy getting arrested for going to the wrong girl"s room and getting in bed with her cause he was so drunk. But it"s ok because these kids are responsible and can have their own house and buy their own booze at 16 or 17.Just last week I knew a guy getting arrested for going to the wrong girl"s room and getting in bed with her cause he was so drunk. But it"s ok because these kids are responsible and can have their own house and buy their own booze at 16 or 17." This example does not apply in a larger, more representative context because it is a single example and about a trend which is not significantly higher in teenagers than those of certain demographic groups which have no extra restrictions. "Binge drinking prevalence among men (23.2%) was twice that of women (11.4%)." "Binge drinking also was most common among persons aged 18"24 years (28.2%)." "In 2010, the overall prevalence of binge drinking among adults in the 48 states and DC was 17.1%" http://www.cdc.gov... "Frequently, seniors consuming the same amount of alcohol as they did in their youth leads to a greater level of impairment" http://www.alcoholmd.com... "While binge drinking is more common among young adults aged 18"34 years, binge drinkers aged 65 years and older report binge drinking more often"an average of five to six times a month." "Although college students commonly binge drink, 70% of binge drinking episodes involve adults age 26 years and older." "More than half of the alcohol consumed by adults in the United States is in the form of binge drinks." http://www.cdc.gov... First off, I'm a guy, so I have the right to say things that may seem sexists without you thinking I'm sexist. Just understand I'm not being anti-men. So to summarize this data teenagers are 11.1% more likely to binge drink than adults (defined as the number of incidences of binge drinking in the last month, then compared to other groups as standardization to obtain a percent.), yet men were 11.8% more likely to binge drink than a women. Further, college students were only 120% more likely to binge drink while men were over 200% more likely to binge drink than women. So what's my point? College students are more responsible with alcohol, in general, than men. So if you try to use alcohol abuse as your argument that minors would abuse it a) such people would not be able to keep out of trouble in the first place which would be required for them to gain such rights and b) most importantly (THIS [the following] IS VERY,VERY IMPORTANT): Any justification warranting the restricting of youth because of a fear by adults of adolescent alcohol abuse can easily, logically be countered by the fact that men are more likely relative to women to binge drink than adolescent are relative to adults and also that the difference between men binge drinking rates and those of teenagers is smaller than the differences of rates of many minorities such as racial, religious, and ethnic minorities. Further, I was lenient and picked the most irresponsible age group to represent adolescents. Plus, I didn't even use standard deviation/error, variance, residuals (i guess that would assume that the relationship is linear, so that wouldn't exactly always work, but it would a lot of the time), sampling distribution or confidence intervals. Furthermore, 70% of binge drinking incidents involve adults above 25 years old and on top of that the adults >65 who binge drink drink more than college students who binge drink, which is scary because adults >65 have a lower tolerance for alcohol than youth meaning they are more affected by it. My stance is that your example does not outweigh my statistical analysis of this, and that it surely does not outweigh the Census. I understand that you mean well and don't want to offend you as I understand that you are trying to protect people, rather take advantage of them or put them down. I'm sorry if my response appears hateful or you feel it targets your character or integrity, this is just something that I am very passionate about. I look forward to hearing your response. Thanks