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How Would You Allocate Your Taxes?

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Xerographica

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The primary criticism of pragmatarianism revolves around how YOU would allocate your taxes. With that in mind I created a simple survey to find out how YOU would allocate your taxes given the opportunity.

The survey allows you to allocate your individual taxes among the 15 Cabinet Departments. But I also included Congress as one of the options so you can allocate as much or as little of your taxes to Congress as you'd like. The more of your taxes that you allocate to Congress...the more you trust their decisions over your own.

Filling out the survey will automatically create a pie chart that you can copy and paste into this thread. Here's how I would allocate my taxes...





Yes, I'm a veteran that graduated from a public university.
 
Are you capable of explaining all the functions each of those 15 departments performs? Are you in communication with the heads of each department so they can communicate their budget needs? Explain the impact of raising or lowering funding for every single department. Now detail how a populace in which 50% of them don't even vote will somehow individually learn how to handle a budget so complex that it takes hundreds of congresscritters+ assorted aides to understand.

You really need to change the name. The sheer impractical nature of your ideologically driven plan is a downright insult to pragmatism.
 

His plan addresses your concern - if someone feels that they lack the knowledge to make an informed choice then they can allocate 100% of their funding to Congress and allow those "experts" to allocate the funds on their behalf.

This scheme being proposed is an excellent method of allowing the invisible hand to work - millions of individual choices will decide what is important to them, rather than only 535 people trying to please 308 million people.
 
RiverDad said:
His plan addresses your concern - if someone feels that they lack the knowledge to make an informed choice then they can allocate 100% of their funding to Congress and allow those "experts" to allocate the funds on their behalf.
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The problem is that people who lack knowledge rarely are inclined to admit it. Nobody in this thread, including me, has any clue what the real impact of altering the funding of all 15 federal departments will be.
 
rathi said:
The problem is that people who lack knowledge rarely are inclined to admit it. Nobody in this thread, including me, has any clue what the real impact of altering the funding of all 15 federal departments will be.
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One can institute procedures which seek to control for your concern. Make it a more time-consuming and laborious process to allocate the money and make it easy to let Congress allocate the money. The people who take the time to allocate their own money have shown the willingness to take a less easy path and they deserve to have their voice heard.

Secondly, it's not really up to others to safeguard people from the consequences of their own actions, even in the collective. If a nation wants to do something stupid, say like ordering banks to increase mortgage lending to minority applicants with bad credit, then it's not the business of "wiser heads" to forbid them from acting stupidly in the aggregate.

If this is a pressing concern, we can institute rolling averages, so drastic budget swings are not implemented immediately and they can be corrected in the following years as the people realize the error of their ways.
 

I like what you did with education.
 
I'd start with the undeniably constitutional functions.
 
An issue with this proposal is that the money that is allocated by people for Congress to spend would be diverted to those areas that they feel were underfunded by the general publics allocation, making the entire process self defeating unless a very significant majority were directing where their tax dollar was going to be spent
 

But this would be an iterative process, not a one-off. As people saw the allocation effects made by citizen allocators and the corrective effects made by Congress, they would alter their decision making in the next year. If Congress "did bad" rather than "did good" then people could decide to allocate less for Congress to play with.

I actually like the part about Congress having some role because it acknowledges that the allocation decisions that I make are decisions made in isolation from other people's decision. If everyone decides to funnel money to defense after another attack like 9/11 then the effect would be destabilizing. If everyone knew what everyone else was doing, then they might not make such a large allocation to defense in that scenario. Congress can be the mechanism which smooths things out the peaks and valleys which are unintended.
 
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I've bounced this idea around with friends at length and the best thing we came up with was 50% taxpayer discretion, 50% congressional discretion. This would avoid the majority of the serious issues with something like this, preventing critical shortfalls.

Conceptually, I like the idea. Nuts and bolts is where the fun is for me on stuff like this.
 

Ultimately, we decided that it would be more a matter of feeling better about it. And there would be a feedback process as those involved see where congress spent what they couldn't allocate. Programs NOBODY likes would be clearly indicated by this process.

Its perfectly technologically feasible.
 

If you design the system so that nobody uses it, whats the point of creating it at all?


We are a representative republic precisely so we can implement safeguards against the idiocy of the public.

If this is a pressing concern, we can institute rolling averages, so drastic budget swings are not implemented immediately and they can be corrected in the following years as the people realize the error of their ways.
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People won't start taking corrective action until they screw it up and feel the pain from their mistakes. Even then, they probably wouldn't have any clue how to fix it even if they wanted to. Limiting drastic budget swings would mitigate the damage somewhat, but still doesn't fix the core problem.
 
Actually, I was wrong, this could be a workable idea. Everyone gets to send in pie charts of how they want to allocate the budget along with their ballots. Congress then proceeds to ignore them and make their own budget. Since nobody actually knows how anybody allocated anything beyond their own ballot, congress could pretend it was the public's budget. That way everyone could have the illusion that they were control, but we wouldn't actually have to destroy the nation in the process.
 
rathi said:
If you design the system so that nobody uses it, whats the point of creating it at all?
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What value do you think you've just added to this conversation? You've done a terrific job at knocking down a strawman. Did I write that the system should be designed to that no one ends up using it? I simply stated that a first-pass filter be put in place - make it somewhat difficult to participate and you knock out a lot of uninformed and/or uninterested people. If you want to add value to this conversation by being a critic, then critique points that I, and others, actually make.

We are a representative republic precisely so we can implement safeguards against the idiocy of the public.
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Clearly there is a lot of dissatisfaction with how these "safeguards" are operating and the results that they're producing.

People won't start taking corrective action until they screw it up and feel the pain from their mistakes.
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That's not a design bug, that's a feature. I don't need some Philosopher-King liberal sitting atop the Commanding Heights making all of my decisions for me and safeguarding me from the positive and negative consequences which will arise from my decisions. Look, if you feel so strongly about the greater wisdom of elected officials then let Michelle Bachman or Cynthia Kinney (pick your poison) make those decisions for you. I know, I know, you don't think that you're the stupid one, it's all the other stupid people in society that you're worried about. If only they could think as critically as you, then there would be no problem. A fool's delusion. You do what you think is best for society, I will do the same, and others will also do what they think best. In the aggregate it is hard to argue that maximizing utility at the individual level will automatically reduce utility at the aggregate level.
 
The way I envisioned the logistics of this would be for each GO to have a fundraising progress bar on their website. Tax payers would make their "donations" directly to the GOs at anytime throughout the year.

With regards to the concept of "mistakes" there are 4 possible scenarios...
  1. an important public good receives excessive funding - can we ever be too educated or too safe or too healthy?
  2. an important public good receives insufficient funding - how important could the good really be if nobody funded it?
  3. an unimportant public good receives excessive funding - errrr...evidently the good was more important than we thought.
  4. an unimportant public good receives insufficient funding - no worries, it wasn't that important anyways.
The amount of funding a public good receives is the only objective way of determining its importance to society. That's the bottom line.
 

Lets suppose that in order to be able to allocate the budget, you have to pass a test showing you have a solid understanding of every single federal department. If you implemented such a system, you would be lucky to get a single digit percentage of the populace involved. Such a small percentage wouldn't have any significant impact on the budget. With no real impact, what it the point of such a program?

Clearly there is a lot of dissatisfaction with how these "safeguards" are operating and the results that they're producing.
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The constitution is still a fine set of safeguards for our nation. Congress was given power over spending for good reason.




Representative republics have a proven track record of balancing the will of the people with the realities of running the state. The American public has trouble getting 50% of the people to the polls and even more trouble separating the actions of OBL and Saddam. The magnitude and complexity of the budget is simply beyond the capacity of the public to handle. The consequences of giving the public direct control of the budget are far worse than the loss of freedom by using congress as an intermediary.
 
The amount of funding a public good receives is the only objective way of determining its importance to society. That's the bottom line.
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Should we apply that same line of reasoning the stock market, tax rate and property in general? If the public is good at determining the value of everything why should we limit them to merely the budget?
 

Well, suppose we didn't do that. Suppose we did something else. If we did something else we could probably expect some variance on the participation spectrum. Let's say that your individual budget allocations were through a web interface. In order to allocate your tax dollars to a department, agency or program you had to navigate your way through a series of web pages, beginning with a portal, then down to a department level page, then down to more specific pages where you would find funding authorization generators, which once clicked would issue you a unique identifier which you would include as part of your allocation budget on your tax return. Do this for all the various programs you want to support, collect all the unique authorization codes, submit every code with your tax return.

You see, no test (again the model you use is predicated on the wise Philosopher-King designing a test for citizens on the presumption that some distant "expert" knows better than the plebes the criteria that is important to them, the criteria that must be satisfied before one is allowed to voice an opinion on how one's tax money is spent, etc.) just an involved process which rewards time spent on process with freedom to make decision. If you don't want to invest the time in navigating through all of the department pages filled with details on their functions and budgets, then you can't have a say. If you do invest the time then you get your say. No centralized top-down uniform criteria imposed on everyone. Look, we constantly get the "Diversity is good" propaganda firehosed at us, so here is a test of that principle - a diversity of opinion gets exercised in how budgets are allocated. Isn't that good? Isn't diversity good? Why is the top-down, elite-formed opinion superior, especially when the centralized position suffers from information asymmetry in that the centralized opinion cannot know what is in the best interests of each of the hundreds of millions of taxpayers.

The constitution is still a fine set of safeguards for our nation. Congress was given power over spending for good reason.
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Liberals have so gutted the Constitution that it can now read to include most anything. I'm of the mind that those who live by the sword have to face dying by the sword.

The consequences of giving the public direct control of the budget are far worse than the loss of freedom by using congress as an intermediary.
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That's a matter of opinion. I don't agree. So you should trust Cynthia McKinney and those like her to make the informed decisions for you and I will trust myself to do what I think is best for the nation.
 
rathi said:
Should we apply that same line of reasoning the stock market, tax rate and property in general? If the public is good at determining the value of everything why should we limit them to merely the budget?
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Each of those examples is indeed working in this fashion. The stock market uses prices as a means of determining value. Property value is determined by what free people are will to freely trade in exchange for purchasing the property. Tax rates at the local level are determined by what the community is willing to fund in the way of expenditures. They vote on bond issues, they vote on school expansions, they vote on all sorts of things down at the local level, in fact many local elections are run on the pros and cons of local spending issues.
 
Rathi, would you say that the majority of voters are familiar with the concept of opportunity cost?
 
Still a work in progress...

 
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