Here's a Thought
Here's a weird thought for Tax Day (I did mine in March, but since it's coming up a lot today).
What if you could specify on your tax forms what you wanted the money spent on? Say, 25% for social security, 25% for education 25% for public transit, fire and police, 20% for scientific research and 5% for the military? What if all the government programs had to persuade taxpayers that they were the best bang-for-the-buck as far as funds went?
Do you think it would work? What do you think would happen?
What if you could specify on your tax forms what you wanted the money spent on? Say, 25% for social security, 25% for education 25% for public transit, fire and police, 20% for scientific research and 5% for the military? What if all the government programs had to persuade taxpayers that they were the best bang-for-the-buck as far as funds went?
Do you think it would work? What do you think would happen?
Think about it like Sim City run by committee: we'd underspend on infrastructure in order to spend more on education and defense, and then before we know it, the roads all break down right before the giant robot attacks. (But hey, giant robot. That'd be pretty awesome.)
Yeah, this is a major drawback to the idea. I consider myself to be more intelligent and interested than the "average voter" and I *know* I have more free time, but I would be intimidated by the amount I would have to learn about government funding to have a good idea of how to allocate my money.
I was wondering if some "wisdom of crowds" would kick in, since the system effectively averages the contributions over the whole population. But I don't know that would actually happen.
gave my local firefighters money which they used to make door-to-door smoke detector inspections, I kid you not)
Could have been worse; smoke detectors are actually useful, unlike some of the stuff Homeland security does.
And while this is true, they weren't supplying smoke detectors, just asking if people had them. V. strange.
(Advertising is already used to promote partisan cheer-leading or act as a form of money laundering to pay friends and buy votes. They once created a campaign for the national mint.... "Excuse me. You're advertising money!")
Another serious drawback--every program that wanted federal funding would have to advertise itself to the voters, meaning less of the money that gets to it actually gets used for the program. Good point.
If people allocated their money to broad categories, I have no doubt that the government would find lots of excuses for shifting the money to the programs they really wanted. If individuals had the binding authority to allocate their tax money to specific programs, it would make the process far too complicated for most people to understand; a few programs would get a lot of media attention and receive absurd amounts of money, while many worthy programs would be ignored. How likely are the people to allocate the right amount of money to paying air traffic controllers or rangers for national forests?
I think they already do, as a matter of fact. I remember my mom pointing out once that people's willingness to vote in favor of extra property taxes or whatever to fund schools just lead to politicians shifting budget money away from schools, confident that it would be made up.
Maybe doing a few more of those "add a dollar" to budgets, without touching the budjet allocations would get more funding extra to your special funding choices, and tell the government a thing or two about the U.S.'s actual priorities. I'd do education, natch (being a teacher and all.)
Being a short story, it left out the nitty gritty of how the politicians might try to implement it.
(And I don't remember anything helpful like the author's name or the magazine it was in or anything.)
I remember that story...
Re: I remember that story...
What worries me is that we somehow need to come up with a system of government that can be overseen by busy people who don't know a lot about it and don't really care most of the time (the average voter). The present system isn't working very well (though the argument can be made that we're getting the government we collectively deserve--but I'm not in favor of collective punishment). But coming up with a better one is hard.
One thing I like about your proposal is that a taxpayer would be allocating money they are obliged to contribute, which I think is likely to inspire a certain sense of ownership--if people are spending money, they are likely to spend it on what they really care about. But the current media environment, I think, would make a poor result likely.
I had enough thoughts inspired by this note to write some of them down in my own journal.
If you get rid of all the telephone sanitizers, Murphy's Law dictates that eventually, as spelled out IIRC in "Restaurant at the End of the Universe," somebody somewhere will contract a plague from a dirty telephone.
True--but how many person-hours of telephone sanitizing would it take to prevent one death, and would those person-hours prevent more deaths if spent elsewhere?