For many people this is a natural progression. When we're young, we are idealistic and also we don't have a lot of wealth to use, lose, or guard. We don't make much money, so we don't pay much tax. We're just ourselves - no family yet, lots of time to make money, if we screw something up we can try something else, etc. There's nothing like a mortgage to make a person start down the path leading from however-liberal to however-conservative. (We don't all start in the same place or end in the same place.) Then you get kids and start to worry about providing for them. Then your earning power goes up and the tax bite increases and you start looking at the way the government is spending your money - and disagreeing with a lot of it, and realizing that whatever government provides (using tax money) costs much more than a comparable non-government undertaking - there's a lot of waste in government; it's unavoidable - but we still don't like it. Then you look at the tax system and understand what "bracket creep" means and realize that the higher income tax brackets were never meant to include most of the middle class. Then you realize that EVERY time money changes hands, government takes a bite of it. Everybody you pay pays somebody else, and at every step, that income is taxed. That really bites! Then you start looking at the estate tax - one of the great demotivators of the universe - noticing that it goes down till 2011 and then goes right back up to the god-awful punitive level it had got to - and I'll be a monkey's auntie before I'll die in 2011 because of some damned tax law........ but maybe my kids don't get all of what I've busted my ass to earn and save..... Then you start looking at all the separate taxes - and the taxes on taxes - and it's enough to make God Himself into a conservative. I'm still a registered Democrat - but I wasn't born yesterday......... It's been a long time since I considered myself a liberal.

anytime I do find myself slipping into this ...I give my self a good slapping and tell myself to WAKE UP !!!

I've been politically conservative since I WAS a teen. Never detracted from my ability to do a kick-ass keg stand, though!

I've always been a mix of liberal & conservative, but I think I've become more liberal, and definitely more understanding and less judgmental of others.

No, definitely not. I have found that as I have gotten older, I have become more confident and educated in and about the views I have held since I was a teenager. Being older also means that people are more willing to take what I am saying seriously, rather than dismissing my opinions as the quixotic views of the young and idealistic.

I have always leaned left on some issues and right on some others. Still do. Age has made me more tolerant, less trusting, but my politics are still mainly middle of the road.

Yes.

I find myself becoming more logical.

I was a flaming socialist in high school and college. I wanted the gubmint to change the world. My first year teaching high school I took home 12,000 USD a year. My second year out of teaching I paid 12,000 USD in federal and state taxes. I asked around and everyone i knew paid about that much. I was baptized by the IRS into a conservative world.