But are those inherent to the system, or are they things that voters influence? For America here is a graph of debt as portion of GDP:
It is harder to find something on how much spending power people have, but I found a graph showing quintiles for real mean household income from here that definitely shows a downturn, and have tried to mark it in similar fashion:
These are only comparing against the names and parties presidents, without paying any attention to any other portion of the government. And in both cases it doesn’t look at all to me like the changes are universal constants, but rather they seem to depend a lot on who Americans have voted in. To the point where I think the burden of proof would be on you to show otherwise.
Things like social security quality and research spending are still harder to find nice graphs for, but it sure doesn’t seem like who is voted in doesn’t make a difference to them. And there are still other things it impacts that genuinely do make a real difference to people’s lives; for instance, there is the chart @Cowicide has been fond of posting:
For other countries it takes a little bit more work to find figures, but I remember at some point checking the debt to GDP ratio in the UK, Canada, and Australia, and the first two showed the same sort of differences as in the US.
Now there are lots of other things where voting one person or another doesn’t seem to make any notable difference, and I am not going to tell you they are any less important than the ones I have picked out. But if you are going to advise people give something up, you have to have some understanding of what they might lose. And as you can see, deciding which candidates get into office is not the “communist choice” you describe, but affects a number of things that do matter to people.
