For US income taxes the only amount of your taxes that you can direct is $3 for the presidential election fund. Why not expand this and let you pick from a dozen or so categories?
So people educated with public funds but without kids will allocate 0$ to education, then complain that youths these days just hang in the street doing no good, and allocate more of their tax towards policing?
We could set minimum amounts to go to schools so that even if every single person in the country allocated $0 of their discretionary fund to public education, the public education system would still have the funds needed.
And the default, if someone doesn't choose any categories, would go to some proportion that Congress would decide. However, allowing even a "small" portion - which could still be billions of dollars - to be allocated directly by taxpayers would gather some very interesting data.
It would be very interesting to see which agencies would attract the most money, and what strategies they'd use to attract people to give their discretionary tax dollars to them.
Would people give more to the CDC, NIH, NASA, the Dept of Housing, Dept of Transportation, Dept of Homeland Security, ... ? We could start to get a direct temperature of what is ailing people the most and what they want their money to fund.
Government agencies could even "advertise," or at least try to get positive news articles that really highlight what they're accomplishing, to spread the word about the good they're doing. It could engage people more in exactly how their money is being spent, and care further about government, because they have at least a small hand in directly funding different departments.
Quakers have been trying to implement a form of this on religious grounds.
At a used bookstore, I found a book(1) about Marian Franz that illuminated the history behind their attempts.
Weirdly enough, there was a personal dedication in the front by David Gross(2), one her colleagues and someone who wrote extensively about the 'War Tax Resistance'.
I'm not religious, so it kinda made me sad, but that book sent me down a rabbit hole. Could you live on 20k a year to avoid income tax and contributing to a war effort? Its impressive.
I lived for quite a while in Kansas, where the state constitution makes adequate funding of schools mandatory. The result is a never-ending series of lawsuits in which the legislature claims to have provided adequate funding, and a court finds that they haven't and orders them to increase or redistribute the funding (sometimes it's found that they under-funded the schools overall, sometimes it's found that they distributed the funding in ways which result in some districts not having adequate support).
This and a few other back-and-forth fights led to the former governor and his party-aligned state legislature attempting to change the selection process for judges, and attaching a rider to that law which would completely defund the state court system if the courts ruled they didn't have the authority to change the selection process, and hinted that if they still ruled against him he'd attempt to recall the entire state supreme court and replace them with partisans who'd support him.
I thought that public schools and policing were funded in the US by local and state taxes not by the Federal government (which is what the Presidential election fund refers to).
I'm not in the U.S. so didn't realised this, but my point was that I'm afraid that most people will want to allocate tax to their pet issue without considering the greater good.
In my mind part of the job of elected politicians is to ensure that tax money is spent where their platform said it would.
I'd love to see a large scale survey where people allocate their taxes, and see what the allocation actually comes to!
The HN crowd might over-allocate $1000s per person to NSF, NIH and NASA and short Social Security while 100+M people contribute $0 to science, but depend on SS to survive. We might end up with the same budget but people feeling more in control.
We'd also see large scale advertising which is actually a good thing: ads are pretty cheap/efficient, make people feel better about their government and society, and employ an army of creative people. I imagine you wouldn't see branches of government running negative ads against each other - it would be more like the feel-good military recruiting ads today.
Sorry if this sounds utopian, I've had a rough week (in addition to everybody's rough week) and need something to feel good about.
That would end up in a popularity contest between agencies, which I doubt is desirable, especially considering some of those disliked agencies [1] are actually useful (like the FDA and the department of education).
And hang in there, the weekend is almost there. :-)
I agree, I'm afraid we'd end up with the government spending equivalent of a poorly planned college potluck. Everyone brings chips and paper plates and there is no actual food.
awesome! I took it, did pretty well:
$2.61T spending decreases
$3.94T increased revenue
$2.85T deficit (i.e. tackle via economic growth aka increased revenue due to increased GDP)
interesting to see how impactful a public health plan is ($158B) and raising the limit on social security income ($633B) and 2% VAT ($885B).
I think because, at the federal level, taxes don't dictate how much one part of the pie gets vs the other. Budgets determine that. The federal government doesn't use taxes to pay for different parts of that pie. Taxes are a way to control inflation and influence behavior, that's it.