I think that Drewder is summarising his understanding of the current tax system, which his voluntary system is meant to cure.
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I suggest a Kickstarter campaign to teach the spelling of ‘responsible’.
I suggest we vote on how to spell it, first.
Who said anything about voting. I’m talking about spending money. Your vote would be how much you send. You want schools to have music programs you pay money into the music program.
So you make a list of how you want your tax money spent, and the millions of things you’ve never heard of out of ignorance would receive no money from you?
California has that problem, sorta, now.
One of the things they have lots of is voter initiatives. Many of which have their own funding mechanisms. i.e. some ballot initiative says “We the voters want a program to do X and we’ll tax 10 cents per citizen per year to pay for it.” Then the initiative passes and becomes law.
Fast forward 50 years. There are hundreds of these 10 cent fees. Many of which vastly OVERsupply money for the program versus the need. Meanwhile many other such programs are vastly Undersupplied with money versus the need.
Either outcome makes sensible operation of those programs virtually impossible. And the law makes it impossible for sensible government agencies to re-prioritize the money between the excesses and the shorts.
The OP’s scenario is that idea on total steroids. The gov’t would pump out a list of a bazillion programs and things and invite the citizens to pay in as they desire. Even if somehow everybody actually paid the right aggregate total, there is no way in heck the money would be apportioned anywhere close to the need. Or close to anything approximating a rational plan.
You may as well just start mailing random amounts of money to random addresses from the phone book. It would represent as much societal good.
Bottom line: If somebody is unhappy with how government decisions are made now, replacing some decisions with no decisions is going 180 degrees the wrong way.
Not *just *the majority; nobody. No one person has that kind of knowledge; no one *government department *has that kind of knowledge. It’s a problem of such complexity with so many details that it has to be - and is - spread out among an enormous amount of people.
Shodan’s comment about the progressive tax system.
Really? When a man was to be put on the moon, did NASA round up a few random strangers off the street and ask them to plan the venture, or did the rely on people who collectively had a body of knowledge and expertise to accomplish it? Obviously, some plans fail regardless of the qualifications of the planning, but experts sure have a better chance of success than all the collected guesses of the uneducated citizenry.
Government departments do not possess all the knowledge they apply, they go outside to recognized experts for advice and guidance. Not to public oppinion.
When your car doesn’t run, do you take it to a mechanic, or go to a laundromat for a consensus opinion on how to fix it, from the people waiting for their dryers to finish?
I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic or agreeing with me without realizing it.
What happens when I vote to fund nothing?
After all, how often will I need the fire department?
Yep, we get it. and we’re laying out a whole lot of reasons your idea would be an abject failure. What is your response to those reasons? Do you think they’re they’re way offbase, or are you starting to understand why your idea is unworkable?
There’s a discussion going on; you are hereby invited to participate.
Because people rarely get excited about very necessary things. Very few people choose to fund roads and infrastructure, for instance. This is still a problem in a representative system, of course, because politicians can rarely run on their “I voted to fix the roads” record, but we’d have even worse infrastructure (or worse, pay $25 to Disney to drive on the Mickey Mouse California Interstate types of toll roads) if the populace were left to fund it of their own volition.
Police is another thing people rarely think about, and leads to all sorts of bodyguard rackets. If you think the police are payed off and corrupt now, wait until all security and investigation is done by private firms because nobody sent money to the local precinct.
This is leaving out all the ways we already let people sort of do this. For instance, my high school band allowed parents to send in tax credits which were essentially a way to directly allocate your tax money to the band program instead of going to a general “education fund” budgeted by the state. There have also been some… weird Kickstarter like things for Public Defenders in some states that didn’t work out too well.
And, of course, this causes an even bigger disparity in rich vs poor neighborhoods. Schooling in poorer districts is already underfunded for a large variety of reasons (including the tax credits above). Imagine if people literally had to choose to Kickstart the poor neighborhood’s school for it to get any money. The poor families can’t afford it, and the richer families likely either won’t think about it, or share the link of Facebook and donate $5 (if anything). Poorer areas of towns would become hellholes very quickly.
This is the sort of “good idea” that only works if you assume everyone is preternaturally altruistic and educated, much like Anarchism or hardcore Libertarianism. I’m kind of a softy optimist about human nature, but even when people are smart and altruistic, it’s simply not feasible to expect them to maintain the level of knowledge required to intelligently and fairly allocate resources to the staggering number of things that need to be done to keep the country running properly.
In a previous thread on the same general idea, I proposed a system whereby knowledgeable and credible groups might put together several different budget packages, and the populace could vote for which they liked best.
The “energy” people might put together the “energy” budget; fans of the military would have the “military” budget. Someone might offer the “social safety net” budget. Each package would be coherent, in a way that individual preference voting would not be.
But, in the end, this is what political parties do, and why we have them.