So I had this off-the-wall idea earlier today,
and I wanted to have SDMB poke as many
holes in it as possible…
Everyone has their tax-related pet peeve,
something that they’d really rather not be
paying for.
What if a small portion, say 5-10%, of our
taxes went to whichever federal program
we wanted them to? You couldn’t just
chose to keep it, but you could decide
whether it went, say, to welfare or to NASA.
It’d be hell on the bureaucracy’s, but ignoring
that, how would it affect the way the
government works?
The Interstate Highway System. Road programs are always pork at the worst. I don’t like highways/freeways/drive everywhere. However, I realize I can not snap my fingers and make our system of car reliance go away. Many Interstate Highways are in terrible shape. Some of the signage along the highways resembles a 3rd world country.
Frederik Pohl has explored this in many of his short stories. As I recall, you pay 1% surcharge on your taxes for each 10% that you designate to go to a certain use, up to 90% of the tax bill. That remaining 10% the gummint gets to allocate any way it wants to, as well as the surcharges. Personally, I think it would be a great idea.
Pohl also wrote about people doing government work in lieu of taxes…the trick was, that the government (and we’re talking state and city as well as national) could call you up in times of emergency and you HAD to report for work, whether you had other plans or not. Thus, if a disaster hit a city, people who worked in lieu of taxes would have to show up and do whatever they were capable of doing to help out. This might mean clean-up for people with no other skills, and it might mean that doctors and other medical personnel would have to provide medical services. Again, I think it would be an interesting idea, though I’m not sure if it would work nearly as well as Pohl writes it.
The anthologies where at least some of these ideas are mentioned are The Problem Pit and The Years of the City. Both are pretty old, as SF goes, and I believe that both are out of print.
When I paid taxes in Illinois I while back, they had a voluntary checkoff program whereby you could pay a little extra tax and the money would be spent on the program you chose from a long list. The OP seems like a good idea to me.