As a thought experiment, it'd be interesting to imagine how things would play out if each taxpayer could adjust little sliders on each category to allocate where they personally would like their taxes to go.

Agencies could recommend funding levels, Congress could recommend an allocation and if a taxpayer didn't change it, that default would take effect. But if a taxpayer preferred, they could say, "no, I won't be funding DOD this year". Or space nerds might say "I'm sending 100% of my tax dollars to NASA!"

Of course no one would likely choose to do boring stuff like paying interest on debt. So we'd probably end up with incredibly well-funded national parks and cool space missions, and also a crippling recession due to defaulting on the national debt.

It is interesting because in a roundabout way this is essentially asking what taxes are for in the first place. You will probably get some kind of “tyranny of the majority/rich”.

For example, if you have a country on the older side, most people will vote to heavily fund social security at the expense of education. As the demographics change, would be no mechanism to correct the issue. Demographics become destiny.

Similarly, taxes allow rich areas to prop up poor areas of the country. California subsidizes the majority of states for example.

Part of the genius of taxes as a technology is that it allows (forces) a large group of people to coordinate to solve problems that they wouldn’t have otherwise. In the ideal case, it allows smart, forward thinking people to solve collective issues.

Organizations don't work well when their budget can change dramatically from one year to the next. There's no ability to take on long-term plans when another, popular department takes 50% of your budget, or someone in your PR department makes a gaffe. Long-term employees get laid off and won't return in a few years when your budget goes back up.

I always think as an individual I would like this. But at scale I worry it would incentivize each department to advertise themselves to the public, which seems to me like a waste of funds. I already dislike the reelection cycle (politicians incentivized to always be fundraising) and would hate to see that happen per department.

I think a ranking system might be easier. People are good at ranking priorities.

The idea breaks down for the rich who are being taxed the most, because nobody wants them to have any say.

You could maybe do it for some percentage of taxes. Perhaps only for things that are desirable but not necessities (maybe Symphonies, science, high arts funding, sports funding, humanities education, BBC, other things people think they shouldn't pay for).

Although that would make people ask for a slider to reduce their taxes (to zero, thank you).

Make charitable donations voluntary? What a novel idea :D

I like your idea, and I wish that it could be practically implemented.

As with voting, implementing your idea would be subject to exploitation. For it to work, you would need a way of ensuring that each taxpayer/voter was authorized to vote, and voted only once. You would need to somehow prevent "harvesting" too.

Those who have an interest in exploiting the system would lobby for built-in weaknesses that they could exploit.

I would be happy if all the laws both at the state and federal level were under version control and we could see who added each line.

I like this idea, but limit it to $1000. Everything in government is funded, but each person can direct $1000 to general fund, a specific department, an initiative, or a registered non-profit.

If the sliders applied only to discretionary spending, it might work.

"crippling recession due to defaulting" - we will just borrow more as usual. Not like our taxes are enough to fund the nation in any year (war or no war).

Sure. I'd set all mine to zero, and keep the money.

I would guess that's a poor thought experiment, because most of us - myself included - don't have a good grasp of what various things cost to make work. And then when you look at the relative points on the sliders you think "Oh, but X is much more critical than Y, surely I can't spend so little on it relative to my spending on Y".

Not to mention the complex semantics and effects of debt in sovereign finance, and actions like increasing or decreasing the money supply etc.

I live in a place with basically zero property taxes (except a pittance for the school). No public roads, no fire, almost no police, no parks, no public utilities.

It's absolutely glorious. I can buy exactly what I need. My monthly utility bills are way lower than anywhere else I've lived.

I cannot believe the populace has been duped into thinking so much of what we fund so direly must be done publicly that armed tax agents need to drag them to prison if they refuse to fund it that way. It is important to remember that everything that is taxed, the underlying method that will be used to enforce that is violence, and very carefully limiting that employ of mass violence.

This line of reasoning seems to be without any deeper thought.

If taxpayers should have the freedom to decide how the money that is taken from them is spent, then why shouldn't they have the freedom to decide how much money they pay?

If taxes aren't collected because the ends justify the means, then the only other option is that they are collected to punish the taxpayers.

The former can be morally justifiable, but how do you justify the latter?

Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right? We are living in your sliders world.

I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.

Taxes do not fund spending. This is a foundational myth of neoliberalism, closely related to the "A national economy is run like a household" myth.

The alternative is Modern Monetary Theory, which states that the government and banking sector money creation fund spending, and governments cannot run out of currency.

Taxes control the money supply and mop up excess funds, which controls inflation.

Bonds set interest rates.

Spending is a strategic and political choice, not something limited by "the deficit" - which is literally just the difference between spending choices and taxation choices.

One very obvious tell is how Republicans make a lot of noise about the deficit and the debt, but always raise both when they're in office.

Always. Why? Because they spend government money lavishly on themselves and their patrons, and cut taxes for themselves and their patrons.

This doesn't "create jobs", it clogs up the system with sclerotic piles of cash that drive an extractive economy that sits on top of the productive economy most people live in.

This is very different economically to stability spending - welfare, healthcare, and such - and investment spending, such as direct funding of education and R&D.

In the MMT, the most significant drivers of inflation are corporate profiteering and supply shocks.

Like oil crises. For example.