Are You Smarter Than An Average U.S. Citizen? (American Civics Quiz)

During the summer, I wrote a post about how stupid we Americans seem to be. Why? We need good legislation to help protect our identity information and to hold corporations accountable for repeated data breaches and poor data security. We consumers must be aware of the issues, and we can't protect our sensitive personal data by ourselves. We need good identity theft legislation, like anti-skimming and data-breach notification laws that some states have.

Good legislation means electing politicians who understand how our government was constructed and should operate. If our elected officials are unaware or incompetent, we can't possibly expect good legislation from them. From Yahoo News:

"US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent... Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)."

Why this is important:

"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned," said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI."

I am concerned and hope that you are concerned, too. We have to hold our elected officials to a higher standard, regardless of whether they are joe-plumbers, soccer-moms, or college graduates. A properly functioning and effective government requires it.

I encourage you to take the online civics quiz. You can see how your score compares to the average citizens and wonder how elected officials answered so many questions wrong. During November, the average test score was 77% correct. By the way, I scored (an embarrassing) 85% correct.