So as part of my last semester of my current educational endeavors I'm taking a class called "Money & Power in the Western World: 1700-2000". I'ts being taught by Niall Ferguson, author of "The Cash Nexus", which is actually the book we're using for the class.

In last week's class, we were discussing one of the correlations he's found in the course of his research, which is that voter turnout seems to fairly closely follow the percentage of a population paying income tax. Historically, as more people have "grown" into sufficient brackets to start paying direct taxes, voter turnout has followed it. The causative assumption is that the act of direct taxation, motivates you to get your otherwise lazy ass out to the polls. For the sake of argument, let's just assume that this argument is true.

The Democrats, in current history at least, are the party that has tried to fight for the less-well-off. In over-simplified terms, they have tried to ensure that those with sufficiently low incomes can eliminate as much tax burden as possible. These people also make up a not-insignificant portion of the population that identifies itself as democratic. So the question is whether in doing so, and given the assumption above, are they actually working to convince their own voter base to not show up?