Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: A modest proposal

As we are beginning to see divisions appear that are destructive to the Constitutional Representative Republic known as the United States of America, with Democrats finding new ways to cheat at democracy and the promotion of mob rule; combined with the massive increase in information technology we've seen over the past 40 years, I propose the following changes to governmental budget processes:

1. Break up the budget into line items

2. Forward those line items to taxing authorities at every level- city, county, state, and federal

3. Allow individual tax payers to fill out an extra-long-form return, with the caveat that by doing so you agree to allocate every penny of your taxes to something that makes a difference in your life or the lives of people you care about.

Doing so would reduce the incentive of the rich to cheat on their taxes (because by paying more taxes, they can regain some small amount of power to fund government programs directly) while enhancing even the common person's ability to influence government (truly voting with dollars for programs that help your family and your friends).

People who choose not to fill out the extra long form, have their taxes applied to the general fund which provides matching grants to those programs that either nobody else will fund (one FTE if your program attracted $0 this year, whose job it will be to promote the program next year; otherwise grants will be some percentage of dollars raised).

The fear being

[Marxist Hacker 42]

That this would reduce certain departments that NOBODY wants to fund to a single bureaucrat working no more than 40 hours a week, effectively destroying some departments utterly, but I'm fine with that.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

I like a lot of your ideas. The system needs to be considered in terms of the feedback loops that drive it to stability.