Our tax payments are spent by politicians on what they think is best for us. Sure we elected these politicians, and sure they promised to spend our dollars in such-and-such way, but at the end of the day they spend our taxes on whatever they see fit. Sometimes the intentions are good, other times they are not. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could choose the way our government spends out taxes money?
It’s a simple concept. Each person gets an account with the government (be it local, state, or federal). This account is your digital identity with the government (paper options would exist as well). You log in to your account when it is time to pay taxes and you can pick from certain “buckets” of categories that you’d like your dollars to go to. Infrastructure, defense, social security, healthcare, and debt interest make up some of these buckets. For those who do not care how their money is spent there will be a “miscellaneous” bucket which can be spent however politicians choose.
So this of course leads to the question of what if one bucket gets adequately filled and other buckets do not? In the case that some buckets don’t get filled then obviously the participating citizens did not care enough about that program to fully fund it. That’s the nice feature of this system; that citizens get to contribute only to the programs they find necessary. If the program is not funded at all or not fully funded, it speaks volumes about how much people actually support it; rather than just being forced to pay your taxes to support programs you don’t like. Unfunded programs will be terminated, for better or for worse. Yes, one day people might decide one day to stop contributing for social security. Yes, that is ill advised. However, it will be the job of politicians to cheer-lead and educate constituents about the need for such programs. That coincides with the answer as to what happens to buckets that get too much funding.
In the case that programs get too much funding, like defense or infrastructure, it is the politicians job to communicate with the constituents that adequate money has been reached and to please contribute elsewhere. If there is too much money the contributors can be reached by email or other means and be asked for permission to move the funds to another bucket. This brings up another problem of constant communication with constituents.
Communication with constituents is a good thing. Constituents input is also a good thing. Effective communication relies on citizens participation in the system. Citizens participation relies on simplicity, transparency, and accountability of the system. Take for example our current federal system of government. It’s complicated. Taxes are complicated. It complicated to find out where our tax dollars are spent. Yes, the federal government has taken strides to improve transparency but it is still not easy. In addition to being complicated and not completely transparent, there’s also a lack of accountability. We have the ability to not re-elect politicians, however we don’t have a real means of highlighting why we’re not re-electing them. If we had a transparent system we could log into that everyone agreed was credible, we could just say “you said you were going to spend money on this, and you instead spent money on that.” Currently, we rely on journalist with biased viewpoints and agendas to tell us what politicians did or did not do. All of these stories are debatable and faced with proving or disproving credibility as to whether or not journalists are telling the truth. With one simple, transparent system for tracking government spending of our tax dollars, we could all agree that money was spend according to our buckets or it was not; thus making it easier to hold politicians accountable. Our current system is plagued with citizen complacency, where citizens do not participate in government because of complexity, non-transparency, and no accountability. We pay our taxes and just hope for the best and are usually disappointed. If it were simple to participate, simple to see the buckets and expenditures, and easy to hold politicians accountable, I believe we’d see a much larger amount of citizens interested in what the government is spending out funds on.
Where are we with this idea? The first issue that needs to be tackled is the software for doing such. Software needs to be built that allows for a government digital identity as well as a simple app to log into to check on our buckets and spending. Further, accounting software needs to be built to collect tax funds into the buckets and be able to generate transparent itemized expenditures. Second we are going to need to pilot the idea. Preferably run this idea in parallel to the existing system for a number of fiscal year to gauge citizen participation, creation/termination of buckets, and the overall software adequacy. If successful, then we start small at a local government level and talk to/sell the idea to politicians. Possible sales strategy would be to let the politician know how much their constituents would love the idea of having a say where there tax funds are spent and support a candidate willing to try this out.