And the default, if someone doesn't choose any categories, would go to some proportion that Congress would decide. However, allowing even a "small" portion - which could still be billions of dollars - to be allocated directly by taxpayers would gather some very interesting data.
It would be very interesting to see which agencies would attract the most money, and what strategies they'd use to attract people to give their discretionary tax dollars to them.
Would people give more to the CDC, NIH, NASA, the Dept of Housing, Dept of Transportation, Dept of Homeland Security, ... ? We could start to get a direct temperature of what is ailing people the most and what they want their money to fund.
Government agencies could even "advertise," or at least try to get positive news articles that really highlight what they're accomplishing, to spread the word about the good they're doing. It could engage people more in exactly how their money is being spent, and care further about government, because they have at least a small hand in directly funding different departments.
At a used bookstore, I found a book(1) about Marian Franz that illuminated the history behind their attempts.
Weirdly enough, there was a personal dedication in the front by David Gross(2), one her colleagues and someone who wrote extensively about the 'War Tax Resistance'.
I'm not religious, so it kinda made me sad, but that book sent me down a rabbit hole. Could you live on 20k a year to avoid income tax and contributing to a war effort? Its impressive.
(1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553714-a-persistent-voi...
(2) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/can-qui...
I lived for quite a while in Kansas, where the state constitution makes adequate funding of schools mandatory. The result is a never-ending series of lawsuits in which the legislature claims to have provided adequate funding, and a court finds that they haven't and orders them to increase or redistribute the funding (sometimes it's found that they under-funded the schools overall, sometimes it's found that they distributed the funding in ways which result in some districts not having adequate support).
This and a few other back-and-forth fights led to the former governor and his party-aligned state legislature attempting to change the selection process for judges, and attaching a rider to that law which would completely defund the state court system if the courts ruled they didn't have the authority to change the selection process, and hinted that if they still ruled against him he'd attempt to recall the entire state supreme court and replace them with partisans who'd support him.
In my mind part of the job of elected politicians is to ensure that tax money is spent where their platform said it would.
I think outside of being offended, you'd just have a hard to getting any agreements on what would qualify.
The HN crowd might over-allocate $1000s per person to NSF, NIH and NASA and short Social Security while 100+M people contribute $0 to science, but depend on SS to survive. We might end up with the same budget but people feeling more in control.
We'd also see large scale advertising which is actually a good thing: ads are pretty cheap/efficient, make people feel better about their government and society, and employ an army of creative people. I imagine you wouldn't see branches of government running negative ads against each other - it would be more like the feel-good military recruiting ads today.
Sorry if this sounds utopian, I've had a rough week (in addition to everybody's rough week) and need something to feel good about.
And hang in there, the weekend is almost there. :-)
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/whic...
interesting to see how impactful a public health plan is ($158B) and raising the limit on social security income ($633B) and 2% VAT ($885B).
If Social Security is an entitlement program like any other, why is there any max income? Why is it only on "earned" income?
* Theoretical Sanders administration aside.
Plus the Better-Dead-Than-Red strain of US Libertarianism. We may be poor, unhealthy, and beholden to wealthy political donors... but at least we ain't no Commie!