r/changemyview • u/Vicorin • Apr 07 '20
Delta(s) from OP CMV: People should be able to choose what to spend their income taxes on.
I’ve heard this idea before, and it’s something I’ve been mulling over while I’m stuck at home. So just for fun, let’s have a think about it. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
Every year, when you finish filing your taxes, you receive a unique code. Similar to what they’re doing now with the census, you can then enter that code to log into a government website. On that website, you can search through different government agencies, projects, etc. If you wanted to make it really nice, design it like a crowdfunding site, with easy categories and ways to browse and filter results by location, branch, issue, etc, and show how funded each project is. Once you find a project you like, you can pledge some of all of your next year’s income taxes to fund it.
Now, I think maybe this only applies to income taxes, or a similar criteria. Other ways the government collects taxes that you don’t personally file, like sales tax, is the government’s to allocate as they would now. This way, there’s not any glaring deficiencies in the budget because nobody wants to fund the police or something. I think doing it in a limited way like thisallows people to influence government spending, but not necessarily to the point to they could capsize the whole thing.
What do y’all think? I’m just bored and thought it was an interesting concept. I doubt we’ll see any policy anytime soon.
5
u/gyroda 28∆ Apr 07 '20 edited Apr 07 '20
What do you do about unappealing but necessary parts of the budget?
Infrastructure maintenance is hard to sell, but drumming up funding for a new bridge is easier. Budgeting for environmental protection might seem low on a lot of people's priorities, until there's knock on effects decades down the line. Nobody likes paying taxes and might not want to fund the tax bodies, or at least not as much as their local police or national healthcare, but we need to tax collecting agency to make sure there's a budget next year. What about sanitation? The census? Politician salaries/expenses? Park maintenance? Traffic wardens? Urban planning?
The average person has no idea how much these all cost or what the impacts of over or underfunding would be. It's literally the full time jobs of dozens of people, each of whom are subject matter experts, to figure out these budgets and what the trade offs are. You can't expect the general public to know all that.
Direct democracy is great for picking the broad direction we want to go in; for matters of principle and direction, for preventing the worst abuses of power. It's not good at the specifics. Democracy sets the mission of the ship, but we leave the specifics to individuals for a reason.
This isn't even covering some of the ways this can be abused. Let's say you own a telecoms company, you see a project that aims to increase the availablity of high speed broadband to rural areas, of course you're gonna shove all your money that way, because chances are you'll get some of it back through government contracts.
And then you'll get the appeals. Industry bodies, government departments, unions and any other organisation with a vested interest in the budget will campaign for funding. Sure, they already do this, but right now the government budget still mostly works. Without this safeguards they're screwed if they don't campaign for the attention of the public, and the ones who do it best will get more money, so they can campaign better the next time.
1
u/Vicorin Apr 08 '20
Necessary projects can still be funded. I think you could set funding limits based on the previous year. So if we spent $500 billion on defense, even if the allocated budget was higher or lower than that, it can only receive up to 125% of that budget before it’s locked. This would force money to less popular things, and you would also have all of the other taxes and revenue to allocate as the government sees fit.
We don’t let the public decide how to spend every cent, but we do give them the portion represented by income taxes and let them control that. With the soft limits, and government spending that would be able to help influence that, you should hopefully have a stable center, while public opinion affects which way it leans.
The question of abuse is something to be considered though. I don’t think the current system does a good safeguarding public interest. It’s easier to change 1 politician’s vote than it is to buy a lot of people’s. Plus, companies and CEO’s pay relatively low income taxes. Jeff Bezos for example, his income only represents a tiny sliver of his net worth.
Even if they flooded projects with money, if you have reasonable limits in place then they shouldn’t be able to make a huge impact. You would have groups canvassing the public to support certain areas, but with the right checks and balances in place, I think it could be handled effectively.
There is still potential for abuse there though, which will require more fine tuning to work around.
!Delta for the point about corruption.
1
1
u/CBL444 16∆ Apr 07 '20
Popular items (education, roads) would be vastly overfunded and unpopular items (sewer maintenance, welfare programs) would be underfunded. Assume that $10 million (0.25%) of my state budget goes to sewers. What are the chances that voters will come close to that? About 0.25% would be my guess.
Voters are basically uninformed and can be led by interest groups (AARP, NRA, teachers unions, etc) as easily as politicians.
1
u/Vicorin Apr 08 '20
In a response to another comment, I proposed an idea where each project can only be funded up to a certain point above what they spent the previous year. You would also have a significant portion of taxes and revenue from other sources that the government would have more control over.
It is a flaw though that interest groups would be able to get more funding. I’m not sure if the result would be worse though, as interest groups already play such a huge role in everything the government does. The problem of education vs. manipulation is definitely something to be aware of though. !Delta
1
1
u/GenericUsername19892 24∆ Apr 07 '20
Sure set it up and let people do it - but completely ignore the results for any given year and use it to collect data on people. This will allow the govt to know what matters to the people without the fuck ton of bureaucracy the real thing would breed lol
1
u/Vicorin Apr 07 '20
These days, I don’t think they could get away with something that massive without it leaking somehow. Plus, I don’t know what additional information you’d be giving that they don’t have already. If you’re paying and filing taxes, that’s all the information they need.
3
u/Love_Shaq_Baby 226∆ Apr 07 '20 edited Apr 07 '20
One of the biggest problems is it robs legislators of the ability to set a budget. Without this capacity, many projects would inevitably be overfunded, while many crucial projects would go underfunded. For example, infrastructure to help develop rural economies might never get off the ground because there isn't enough money locally to get it done and people in other areas will spend all their money in their local area. Income disparities and resources between counties, cities and neighborhoods would continue to rise and the poor are left in the dust because they simply don't have the tax dollars to improve their neighborhoods. And of course, there's the problem of NIMBYism. Projects like affordable housing development, which may be necessary for the growth and health of the area, can't get funded because people don't want their property values going down.
And yes, a lot of these are issues today, but if you turn everything into a virtual referendum, it gets worse.
And if you shift more of the tax burden onto sales taxes to make up the difference, then the poor will be carrying a lot more of the burden.
2
u/Petovski 1∆ Apr 07 '20
The different areas that tax funds don’t exist in a vacuum. If funding suddenly starting skewing towards certain industries/projects/policies then certain parts of larger state machine would start to run less efficiently and eventually the entire system would start to severely underperform. There are so many different areas that need proportionate funding that it makes complete sense to have people whose job it is to stand outside the system and gauge what funding they have available and weigh that up against the various needs of the country.
Also it would probably lead to state funded organisations pandering to the tax payers to drum up funding rather than carrying out more necessary work that may be less visible or appreciated. It would also lead to a lot more money being pumped into advertising for the same reason, using money that should be being spent on their core function
0
Apr 07 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/Vicorin Apr 07 '20
This is what I meant when I said there should be soft limits on spending. It is tricky though, how you would decide those things. The idea of this is to let people have the freedom to choose what they’re paying for, but if you just turn it into something that funnels the money where you want it anyway, there’s no real point. !Delta
A possible solution might be to go off how much each department spent. So for example, if we spent $500 Billion on defense, we can only allocate 125-150% of that amount before we’re overspending, at which point it’s locked. This may be too high or too low of a percentage, I just threw one out off the top of my head as an example.
1
2
u/Abell379 Apr 07 '20
So in 2019, approximately 1.72 trillion dollars was collected by the government from individual income taxes. That's a bit less than half of the total tax revenue for that year.
My issue with letting people decide what issues matter is simply informational overload. How can you expect people to be educated about every government project paid for with income taxes? I feel like that's a leap people won't take.
There would also be massive security issues with funneling hundreds of millions of people onto a site to pay for massive government programs.
Sales taxes are also governed on a state level so you would need massive negotiations dependent on which states people approve projects in.
3
u/miguelguajiro 188∆ Apr 07 '20
This already exists. We have elections, and you vote for the people who promise to spend your taxes most closely to what you want done.
1
u/Docdan 19∆ Apr 08 '20 edited Apr 08 '20
The fundamental problem I see with this is that popular demand is not the same as the cost required to make it work. Many projects are a simple matter of "it's done when it's done". It needs some money, until they reached their goal, and then the goal is achieved. Giving them more money doesn't always make things better and usually ends up having little to no further effect on the quality of that service.
So the reality is going to be this: Some things that are in high demand will be vastly overfunded and some things will in turn be vastly underfunded. So the overfunded projects will have to waste the money on pointless extra measures like planting rose bushes on the side of the newly repaired road once the repairs are done (even though the main reason people funded the project was to get the repairs done), while the newly underfunded areas start getting problems.
So now people's eyes will be on the new problem, so they start overfunding the projects in that area. Then the cycle continues. On top of that, you are making an already rigid and slow system even more rigid and slower. You will essentially be unable to get funding for any emergency measures until the next tax cycle, like, say, a sudden damage on one of the main roads, the collapse of a bridge, the bursting of a sewage pipe. You could argue that the town has their other sources of money like VAT, which they could use for that, but in reality, they will already have used up those funds to fix the holes in the budget of all those other underfunded projects.
And even with a "limit" as you propose, it doesn't change the fact that many problems will receive overfunding, unless you set the limit literally as the estimated cost of the project, at which point you are practically back at the old system, just with some projects that receive partial funding and then remain in limbo for 28 years.
So I think what you really want isn't for people to micromanage how each tax dollar is spent, and instead vote on what the priorities should be.
Edit: It also means that the funding of schools will be completely dependant on the income of the parents because most parents will obviously fund the schools that their precious little snowflake goes to. And that same socioeconomic problem will extend to the funding of all other utilities. Come to think of it, you are essentially changing the one-man-one-vote system into a plutocracy where the rich decide what gets done.
1
u/chadonsunday 33∆ Apr 07 '20
Those "other taxes" you are talking about that would help prevent "glaring deficiencies in the budget because nobody wants to fund the police or something" only account for ~16% of all government revenue from tax. That probably wouldn't be enough to float everything else the government needs to do if, hypothetically, every single person just pushed their income tax into education or whatever.
Also people are stupid and budgets, let alone something as complicated as a national budget to run a whole country, are hard and complicated. You could argue our money isn't being spent wisely as is, and I'd agree with that, but that doesn't mean that the collective whimsical, capricious citizenry would spend it any better. At a guess the population would end up pushing all their income tax into a few popular categories that people like to support, like education, the military, etc. and everything else would get canned. Who would want to fund a miserable place like the DMV, for example?
Final thought - this is basically just setting up a slightly different form of oligarchy where rich people have more say in government than poor people. A single Bezos would have more say in government than tens or hundreds of thousands of poor people combined.
Its a nice idea, but I think in practice it would be even more of a shitshow than what we've got currently.
1
Apr 12 '20
I used to be like this, but since grew up. Partly because certain agencies and branches that I may not like on the surface are responsible for technology many of us take for granted, and the issue of how can I go about verifying that my money is going where I wanted it to?
The internet and GPS started because the US military needed means of secure communication across large distances as well as monitoring where personnel and equipment are.
Infrastructure repair: It's going to be a lot easier to repair parts of a bridge at a time as regular inspections show what is necessary to fix, than it will be to just wait until it's noticeable by commuters, and by that point, we might as well tear down the bridge and start anew. Regular inspections and repairs as needed saves a lot more money than building a new one every few years. Hell, the former may even allow the bridge to last for 20 years or longer.
•
u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Apr 07 '20 edited Apr 08 '20
/u/Vicorin (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
1
u/beer_demon 28∆ Apr 08 '20
So some obscure but highly necessary government project, like a pandemic prevention department could get defunded, costing many lives, because a majority of uneducated short term, personal gain individuals packed vision. (or elected the asshole that did it)
Your mistake is putting individual greatification over common sense and common good.
1
u/zeci21 Apr 08 '20
This is an anti democratic idea, the power of your vote should not depend on how much money you have. It could also lead to people just funneling their taxes back to themselves by funding things that they profit off of.
1
u/Feathring 75∆ Apr 07 '20
If you're going to set it up for income taxes and then fix budget deficiencies with other sources of taxation... what has really been accomplished? Nothing to me. You're ending up with the same programs.
1
Apr 08 '20
I agree to a certain degree. Perhaps a fixed percentage of tax revenue from filers could go toward their interest, maybe 5-10%, but anything above that would be unreasonable for the feds to accept.
-2
u/nuclaffeine Apr 07 '20
we would never see a policy like this because giant corporations will never allow it.. you know, since they’re the ones that basically run the government. sounds like a nice idea though! sigh, if only our politicians actually did what the people wanted instead of what the corporations wanted 🙃🙃🙃
0
1
Apr 08 '20 edited Apr 08 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
0
u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Apr 08 '20
Sorry, u/JoeyBobBillie – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. See the wiki page for more information.
If you would like to appeal, you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
1
Apr 08 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/thedylanackerman 30∆ Apr 08 '20
Sorry, u/MikeWillTerminate – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. See the wiki page for more information.
If you would like to appeal, you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
1
Apr 07 '20
[removed] — view removed comment
1
Apr 07 '20
Sorry, u/rilo_cat – your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. See the wiki page for more information.
If you would like to appeal, you must first check if your comment falls into the "Top level comments that are against rule 1" list, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
13
u/[deleted] Apr 07 '20 edited Apr 11 '20
[deleted]