How Would You Allocate Your Taxes?

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.

 

The main News channel here, CBC stated today that Americans whose income is less that $90,000 a year don't pay income tax.

If that is so, most people here are not in a position to answer your post since they don't pay any.

 

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Education is important, but it should be locally funded. So not as much in the federal budget.

The OP homeleand is also too large for my taste. I don't need to waste a ton of money and make a bunch of red tape and take naked pictures at airports. Terrorists can find ways around all this crap, just blow up a train instead or a football stadium or whatever. It is like the billions spent on a ICBM missle shield that is bypassed by a cheap cruise missle or putting a bomb on a fishing boat. It is a waste of money. Just like the French who built a huge wall with Germany, and they simply walked around it through Poland.

 

I would allocate a portion of my taxes to me and my children. Maybe 20%. Okay, so the politicians might have to get votes based on performance instead of buying votes with my money. Maybe the friends and relatives of politicians wouldn't be filling their pockets with my money. Maybe? It's a dream, isn't it? Maybe some of the healthy, capable people on the dole would have to go to work. Bummer, huh?

Maybe the federal Department of Education would cease to exist. Amazing. Perhaps the government wouldn't be able to use our money to give deadbeats home ownership. Oh, the horror.

I'm tired of pulling the wagon. When do I get to ride free?

 

First off that is way too much on defense. Also your action are OFFENSIVE almost 80% of the time. Your army is filled with broke stupid heroes and the people of your country pay through the teeth for them and the soldiers still get next to nothing. They sacrifice everything in vain wars and genocidal missions. Your country spend good coin on genocide and you are directly (at least you were) involved. The US army is a bunch of war hungry terrorists and its no wonder 30% of your troops come back (*)(*)(*)(*)ed in the head or (*)(*)(*)(*)ed up by a real freedom fighter who fights DEFENSIVELY.

 

I don't know. I started to do one and realized yet another reason to be opposed to this kind of thing.

My original reason is simply that people cannot individually know what the greatest needs are in a large nation, especially where complex policy is involved. We are also unlikely to know how much funding each department needs to do its basic tasks in anyway.
And even if we judge this well individually, the result will likely be so much money going to the programs with the most need that those departments meet their goals and then begin wasting the rest-- or at least using funds on specific policies that may not be as valued as some specific policies carried out be departments that are overall valued lower.

In other words, I see nothing pragmatic about this (I usually think of pragmatic being more technocratic, which is the exact opposite-- having accountable people who are experts looking at the situation from a macro-perspective making such decisions). This is really an ideological thing that puts individual "principles" over effective governance.

What I noticed once trying to do this is another problem-- the first thought that jumped in my head when I considered changing agriculture funds.
It depends on the time, doesn't it?
And that adds yet another dimension of error. People will become emotionally tied to some areas of governance over others and likely stick with them over time, well into changes.
For instance, agriculture today could probably do with less money.
But I could see conditions under which agriculture funding could be the most crucial thing to helping our population. But by the time I would notice, the problem would already be leaking out and it would be too late to institute any meaningful changes.

So really all this would do is make funding more ideological, less predictable, less macro-focused, less efficient, and more short-sighted.
IT would actually make our already flawed budgeting process worse.

 

JavaBlack, is there a limit to the concept of 2 heads being better than 1?

How much funding should individual government organizations (GOs) receive? The only objective way to determine this answer is by forcing tax payers to consider the opportunity cost of their funding decisions.

Consider these four 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.

"Importance" can only be objectively determined by the funding decisions of tax payers.

Regarding time of year...the way I see it implemented is as follows. Tax payers could divvy up their taxes among three different tiers. The top tier would be congress, the middle tier would be the Cabinet Departments and the bottom tier would be the individual GOs. Each GO website would have a fundraising progress bar on their website and tax payers could make "donations" directly to the GOs at anytime throughout the year.

Right now we don't usually hear about people intentionally overpaying their taxes...but with a pragmatarian approach...if people are concerned that a certain GO is underfunded then I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed more than their fair share to help support its objectives. Right now the current system is focused on cutting, with the proposed system the focus would shift to contributing.

It's pragmatic because it shouldn't matter whether an organization is public or private, what matters most is results. Deng Xiaoping said he didn't care if a cat was black or white, what mattered was whether it caught mice. China is where it is today because of Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic outlook. The only way we're going to be able to keep up is if we focus on results rather than ideology.

Boondoggles can exist indefinitely with the current system. But would you continue to contribute your hard earned taxes to programs that do not produces results? The people who earn the money have the greatest incentive to ensure that their hard earned money is not wasted.

 

Yes. What if one person actually knows something about the issue and the other knows nothing, isn't very bright, and is actually hostile toward the entire idea for stupid reasons.
Not all group decisions are destined to be better.

The problem is that people do not have good information on what organizations do, how much they need, or-- especially difficult-- what other people are allocating money to.

It's not actually objective. It's very democratic, but not objective.

No, but that's not the problem. The fact is that at some point, additional money leads to diminished returns on utility. The problem that emerges is we wind up throwing extra money down the toilet that could be used for other important programs we didn't fund well enough to get full utility from (which were most likely underfunded due to emotional reaction).

Things can be underfunded for a lot of reasons:
1. People don't understand what a department does.
2. People don't understand how much the department needs to meet its basic goals (they assume it can make do with less, underestimate the size of the problems it's focused on)
3. People allocate more money than necessary to other programs, not realizing what others are doing.
4. Some programs don't have a direct and visible effect on the average taxpayer.
5. Similar to 4, only worse... people who have money (and thus pay a higher share of the taxes) have different interests than people with less money. Because a rich person doesn't need retirement insurance or medical care doesn't mean the rest of the population doesn't.

Valued isn't the same as important.
If we value arts heavily and give it 50% of our revenues, civilization will likely collapse.
And we still have the problems mentioned above about lack of information.

To illustrate how you are misusing the word "important" consider an example.
Say most of the tax money gets diverted completely away from programs to help the poor... quite likely, as the richer you are, the less likely you are to see the benefits.

Somebody is going to starve because helping them wasn't "important."

This is a terrible misuse of the word.
This system is really no better than abolishing taxation and having people give to charities of their choice instead (which is, for the record, a terrible idea).

Okay... another example of how you're misusing the word.

Remember high school? Those student elections? Most likely some really popular kid won, a jock or cheerleader with a lot of friends and in a bunch of clubs.
Is that person objectively more "important" than the nerd studying to be a rocket scientist?

I would be incredibly surprised if people gave more.
It's again the problem of not knowing what everyone else is doing.
There is no point in my giving extra money if a sufficient number of people are not doing the same.
In order to get around that, they'd need to come up with fundraising initiatives, like a charity. That adds some overhead and I'm pretty sure no one will be putting their money into the outreach program.

This would do nothnig to keep us focused on results rather than ideology.
You realize that there are working class people who vote Republican because they believe someday trickle down economics will work. Ideology is about beliefs and can't be separated from the decision-making process. The same people who elect our leaders will be deciding how to divide money.
The reason that is bad is because it makes it IMPOSSIBLE for the decision-makers to have a truly good macro-level view of the situation.
The system itself is based on an ideology that suggests bottom-up approaches work better than top-down in large populations (which is not exactly in line with historical evidence... bottom-up approaches work well for small populations and are terrible for large ones).

What programs produce no results?
And how does funding actually determine that?
Without study, it's impossible to determine whether a program isn't working because it lacks funding, because it wastes funding, or for some other reason. In any case, cutting funding from the entire category a program exists in is not a good way to increase results. And giving funding to categories with working programs doesn't necessarily make them better. Nor does taking funding from working programs or giving them to non-working ones guarantee results.
Not to mention, people are not exactly informed on what programs and categories are the most or least efficient.

And I can't stress enough how crazy it is to do this by category.
So what if a category contains a very popular andimportant program, but also a wasteful one people hate? It will get more or less funding based on which one they think of first.
Overall the category thing is like doing surgery on a finger with a katana.

 

JavaBlack, not sure if you realize it but most, if not all, of your arguments are equally applicable to why a planned economy is better than a free-market economy. According to Wikipedia..."planned economies exist in very few countries such as Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, and Myanmar".

The only difference between public goods and private goods is that people can free-ride off the contributions that others make to the common good. To fix that problem all we need to do is take one step...force people to contribute. Once people are coerced into paying taxes then it should be up to the invisible hand to decide how much funding the various government organizations receive. To argue otherwise is to ignore what other countries have learned the hard way.

Don't get me wrong, by no means am I saying that the free-market is perfect...it has its flaws. But it sure beats having leaders try and pick who the winners and losers are.

 

For starters, I would never ever assume that I am unbiased by my life and since having that power assumes that I would be president or similar (correct me if I'm wrong), I would base this on the ministers of the relevant areas.

 

Factor in that some of the agencies in your State will make money or bring in revenue, like the public safety, judicail system, Human services, and the University medical and state funded medical centers, Department of Transportation, and housing and urban development, and building and development industry.

Also know that the largest burdens on the State government will not bring in any revenue, like the department of education, and the fire department.

So why is the State government more important than the Federal Government's budget? Because everyone uses the state government services, and pays into the State tax system, even if there is no state tax in your state. Any unballanced tax structure in your State will have a bigger impact on your life than when the Federal GOV changes anything. That is unless you live off the federal government cheese.

If your State fails in its tax collection, you will feel the effect first hand, and it will impact your way of life more than the fed.

 

Actually my arguments are why representative democracy is better than direct democracy.

So, in other words, your idea is forcing me to take the conservative side. Or at least what would be called conservative in normal times.

Looking at the evidence of history and the social sciences, I do not believe bottom-up governance works for LARGE societies. Perhaps a small enough township could incorporate your idea on the local government level without issue (though in the areas I'm accustomed to, townships that small and closely-knit are a rarity), but this idea would be disasterous for the federal government.

I pointed out the primary reasons being those of imperfect information and individual bias.

We both agree on taxation for the same reasons, sure.
But there are some areas of strong disagreement:
1. I think representation should be per capita, not per dollar. Even people who pay very little in taxes and people who cannot afford to pay taxes should have representation, as they still have stake in the government. A wealthy CEO should not have hundreds of thousands of times the power to set the government agenda as the average citizen.
So... on this issue, I think I'm taking the more liberal and democratic stance: one person-one vote.
2. Adding too many people to specific decision-making causes everything to get muddled. People have differing degrees of expertise, understanding, interest, and intelligence, not to mention different ideological trappings. That's why we elect representatives, to be accountable, be informed, and make decisions on our behalf.
So... here I take the conservative stance.

I guess what it comes down to is that, though I am a liberal at heart, I see no point in attempting to push ideology where it cannot realistically work.
The same reason I'm not an anarchist or a communist.
I think your idea is well-intentioned, but both undemocratic (giving more power to those who pay more taxes) and unworkable (too much micro, not enough macro).

 

I would cut funding for every department listed and totally eliminate a lot of those listed.....Homeland, Energy, Education,Labor, Housing as a good start.

 

I filled this out with the presumption that this is federal tax money alone. The ones I zeroed out should be purely state (not federal) functions.

 

I would not. I do not know enough about economics to give my tax money to the departments that truly need it. I would allow the people who's job it is to allocate the taxes do so. What makes you think you know enough to accurately distribute your taxes?

 

JavaBlack, let's take going to war with Iraq as an example. With the pragmatarian approach the decision making process would have been exactly the same. The difference is when it comes to funding. The tax payers would have been in charge of deciding how much money the war effort would have received.

In this video of Milton Friedman being interviewed...the interviewer starts to ask him a hypothetical "if you were dictator for day..." question. Before he can even ask the question Milton interrupts him and strongly emphasizes the importance of democracy. He says, "If we can't persuade the public that it's desirable to do these things, then we have no right to impose them even if we had the power to do it."

Bush said that Iraq had WMDs...so did that persuade you that we should have gone to war with Iraq? It certainly didn't persuade any of my liberal friends. Yet, those same liberal friends then turned around and derided our government for not stepping in to end genocide in Darfur.

According to Steve Ellis, "We are not making these funding decisions on the basis of project merit. It is about political muscle."

What's the solution? Pragmatism.

You're totally correct that....

The best, if not the only way, to truly hold our representatives accountable is to allow tax payers to choose how much of their individual taxes they allocate to Congress.

 

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith

Do you think the butcher, the brewer, or the baker know more about economics than you do? Yet it's their decisions that our economy is based on.

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill

Our democracy, like our economy, does not depend on us being informed. If that were the case we'd have destroyed ourselves a long time ago. Both our democracy and the economy only depend on people making decisions based on their own interests.

Is it in our individual best interest to be informed? Sure! But the economy could care less whether you eat at McDonalds or Subway. Just like democracy could care less whether you vote for Obama or Ron Paul. With democracy and economics it's not about being right or wrong...it's about the opportunity to TRY and protect your interests.

The baker can only know how much bread to bake by looking at how much consumers are willing to pay for bread...and it's the same exact thing with our taxes. A department can only know how much public good to produce by looking at how much money tax payers are willing to allocate to that department. This is known as opportunity cost.

Just like it's wasteful for a baker to supply more bread than the market demands...so too would it be wasteful for a department to produce more of a public good than the public truly demands. But right now our government has NO objective way of truly knowing how much of which public goods we want. The result is a huge waste of our taxes.

 

I think this actually illustrates why using public opinion in such a way makes for bad policy.

Remember, at the beginning of the war, it was popular. Mostly for bad reasons: 9/11 (unrelated really, but not in the public imagination), WMD's (a mistake or exagerration, possibly a fabrication). There were other reasons why the decision-makers favored it that were more solid (Saddam's genocide, the possibility of Saddam aiding terrorists against the US and its allies) but not as popular with the population.
So what we learn from the beginning of the war is that even when the public isn't likely to support a policy on its merits, elites can influence opinion with emotional pleas and shaky evidence.
The war would have been initially popular.

The war lost popularity as it was determined the reasons most people supported it were false and as the perceived original goals were completed (i.e. removing Saddam).
But we continued on because decision-makers in the government made the choice, not the people.

What would have been the alternative?
Public dissatisfaction would have caused us to drastically cut funding and likely prematurely withdraw directly after destroying the government structure of Iraq, but before helping to replace it with something to stabilize the nation.
This would have left Iraq more dangerous than when we initially went in, a failed state and haven for terrorist groups.
Unfortunately Americans are not well known for having a long view of foreign policy action. They can easily be influenced to support wars for reasons of fear and sometimes humanitarianism... but they never support larger, more expensive efforts required to stabilize regions and prevent further problems. Government officials tend to make those hard calls.

Foreign policy in general is a tough one to justify public direct control. It's an area Americans don't understand, underrate the importance of, exagerrate the costs of. It's also an area where some level of certainty is required for it to work. Why would any other government deal with us if it believed we would flake out as soon as the polls changed?

Also consider the problems I brought up before.
If Iraq funding was cut quickly, how would we even know we had enough funding to safely withdraw the troops?

 

JavaBlack, do you honestly believe that you would have been the sole voice of reason trying to persuade tax payers of the value of stabilizing the region? You yourself said that "People have differing degrees of expertise, understanding, interest, and intelligence, not to mention different ideological trappings." So how would all the tax payers have simultaneously decided to stop funding the war effort in Iraq?

The diversity of values would guarantee a diversity of funding. Look at the diversity of responses to this thread. So far no two allocations have been exactly the same. Yet with our current system we're forced into two main camps...liberals and conservatives. It shouldn't be about big or small government...it should be about how effective government is. It shouldn't be about labels...it should be about results.

It's great that you're questioning the pragmatarian approach. But I challenge you to ask other people what would happen if this approach was implemented. By far the most common response will be that "other people" will forget to fund "x" public good. If you ask enough people though I promise that you'll notice a pattern. It will be the same pattern that's clearly displayed in this thread.

The more people you have observing a complex picture the less likely it is that small details will be missed. The aggregate won't "forget" to fund anything. The amount of funding that government organizations receive will accurately reflect how much we value the public goods produced by those GOs.

 

10% to Israel (Specifically the IDF) 10% to the GOP 5% to California State Government 5% to United States Government

 

Commerce, Justice, State, and Treasury each got 5%. Defense got the rest. Everyone else got nothing.

wat?

 

Black Monarch, your allocation has by far been the closest to Milton Friedman's in this video. So I'm kind of curious why, unlike Milton Friedman, you'd allocate 5% of your taxes to commerce. We all have different values of course so there is no wrong or right answer...just curious.

 

I'm really not sure that any of those (other than defense) would actually need a full 5%; it was just an arbitrary number. I decided to keep the Department of Commerce because the regulation of commerce is, in fact, one of the enumerated powers of Congress.