Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.
npr.org
npr.org
I think this is a logical extension of that idea, and its great. I'd also like to see the flip side of the receipt contain a guess for how the same tax amount would break down the following year based on current budget trends. That way you could see how the coming year is different from the current year. Complaining about NASA funding is one thing -- seeing that they only get 20 bucks while Social Security gets over a thousand? Puts the situation in much sharper contrast.
It's strange that the government works in such an arcane fashion. A simple thing like a receipt for your taxes is probably very hard or impossible to accomplish. It took many years for Moynihan to get his SS statements. I have doubts that this would ever fly.
But it is certainly a simple and profound idea.
With greater public knowledge, perhaps we'd finally be able to move past the irrational demonization of expenses that don't matter (but win cheap political points), and focus our attention on the actual problems.
Or better yet, invest in technology so they rejuvenate old people to the point that they can enter the workforce and earn their living for the rest of their life(presumably several centuries).
I am merely suggesting that we should return the care of elderly to the families, who are in better position to know what their elders need.
I am also suggesting that people should invest in anti-aging research so that social security would be entirely unnecessary.
Many people agree with you that people should take care of themselves, and that Social Security and Medicare should be, at most, a safety net for people who would otherwise be old folks on the streets without healthcare. Such a policy is usually referred to as "means testing" retirement benefits.
Eliminating government retirement benefits altogether will never happen because no one likes seeing 70 year-olds suffering in poverty, but they don't dislike it enough to ameliorate the problem directly via charity. Humans are weird like that.
Ignore that. I was reading a parent's post and reply to the wrong parent comment.
Many people agree with you that people should take care of themselves, and that Social Security and Medicare should be, at most, a safety net for people who would otherwise be old folks on the streets without healthcare. Such a policy is usually referred to as "means testing" retirement benefits.
No, this is not what I advocated. I advocated that the family should resume the role of caretakers(or what been eroded by government) instead of leaving old folks alone in old people homes. Old people can then serve as babysitters, teachers, etc, to grandchildren. That is assuming, that they do have them.
Eliminating government retirement benefits altogether will never happen because no one likes seeing 70 year-olds suffering in poverty, but they don't dislike it enough to ameliorate the problem directly via charity. Humans are weird like that.
Maybe some. But this is ignoring the option of creating mutual aid societies. Fraternities organizations used to exists in large number and large number of Americans join them, regardless of their race and class. They provide orphanage, hospitals, and even home for elderly. Now the welfare state serve some of these functions, some said, poorly.
What do you think should happen to those who are unable to reproduce, or who choose not to, or whose children die before them, or whose children are just jerks who won't help their parents out?
So this is saying that we should need a government to help out all these old people that do not have anybody to help them.
That's nice, but government aid have crowding out effect on mutual aid societies and the like, and that's assuming that government aid are actually better than family based, charity based, mutual aid societies and other voluntary assistance.
Beside, the increasing wealth of society and technological development should eventually help those old folks out. Charity would eventually be able to buy more food and shelter per dollars.
Look, my suggestion isn't perfect and won't cover all the case scenario. But government is a tradeoff. You might be paying it through taxes, increased bureaucracy, less innovations amongst charity, etc.
All things being equal, I think I consider a voluntary effort to support the old people to be more ethical than coercing people to support these people.
Not true. Paul Ryan did, and even got into a fairly public fight with Paul Krugman about it [1].
http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/
[1] The fight was mostly over matters of little substance - Krugman told a few lies about Ryan which blogger Megan McCardle repeatedly debunked. The substance of the proposal was not discussed. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/krugman-... http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/paul-kru...
If Ryan came out swinging and saying "YEAH i want to dismantle SS", that'd be different.
Krugman: "...Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; [...] he chose not to get that 10-year estimate. "
McCardle: "...I contacted Ryan's staff, who were happy to clarify that yes, they asked the JCT to do a forecast, and JCT said no."
As I said, nothing of substance. Just Krugman dishonestly attempting to paint Ryan as a liar (I believe "flim flam man" was the term he used).
On substantive matters, if you look at Table 1 of the CBO's score of Ryan's roadmap, you see that Ryan clearly proposes cutting medicare by just under 40% by 2040 (and even more drastic cuts after that).
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10851/01-27-Ryan-Roadmap...
I didn't suggest that it was. I just think that if we're going to have an intellectually honest discussion about the matter, we have to disregard most of the Republican party rhetoric: the poor are not the problem. The elderly are the problem. As far as I'm concerned, nobody is saying that out loud.
The Democrats are just as guilty of pandering to their base (which is also elderly), but at least they don't hang the poor out to dry in a cynical attempt to distract attention from the real problem.
The other problems you state are meta-problems - they're the reason we can't solve any actual problems. And possibly more concerning than actual problems.
Obviously poor people aren't the problem either -- personally I want to see far more immigration of poor people who want American jobs (yes I want rich immigrants too ofc) -- but inefficient govt programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits do cost a lot of money.
The problem is the govt and its mistaken idea that redistributing wealth can help people. It doesn't. It destroys wealth. We'd all be way better off if they'd never done it in the first place, including the poor and elderly. (Now we have transition issues. We need to abolish it in a way that doesn't screw people who are relying on it.)
I'm not sure I'd describe medicaid as "comparatively minor". Medicare is $390B, medicaid $247B ($290B including the state contributions). I guess the threshold for expenses that don't matter must bet somewhere between $290B and $390B.
http://usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html#usgs30210
(Use the dropdown to select year=2008, the last year for which full data is available.)
[edit: curious why I'm being downmodded. Is posting the actual numbers so detrimental to the conversation?
edit 2: put in the federal-only numbers, thanks jbooth for pointing that out. ]
The original contention was just regarding medicaid -- 290 billion compared to a 3 trillion budget, with a > 1 trillion deficit. Entitlements all together add up to about half of the budget. They're big. But the original point was that nobody wants to touch medicare/SS but everyone makes Medicaid the bad guy. Makes you think they're more concerned with demographics and likely voters than budget arithmetic.
EDIT: Watches the downvotes. Chill out guys, it's just numbers. You'll win the house this fall, take it easy on HN.
While I agree that medicaid is a politically easier target than medicare, it's not a small program. It's a completely legitimate target of criticism, and eliminating it would significantly improve the federal budget.
(for the record, I'm keeping it extremely civil in the numbers but find the thrust of this morally disturbing because I think there's a right to basic medical care and you can't deny it only to the poor)
(EDIT in reply: Yeah, that's fine, and I went with it, but talking about percentages of a 380 billion dollar deficit in the context of current events is just plain silly.)
As for the specific mechanics, I'll refer you to another post in this thread which provides a number of mechanisms: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745969
More or less any of them should work.
You want to burn a $290 billion dollar program to the ground, with consequences like "poor people don't get insulin", and you can't even be bothered to think about which top level line item should be moved around?
This is why Al Gore sighed into his microphone that time. Yeah, it lost him the election, but when are you people going to realize that studied ignorance is not the way to solve problems?
2009 US Federal Spending: 3,518 Billion (100%)
2009 US Defense Spending: 782 Billion (23%)
2009 US Social Security: 678 Billion (20%)
Medicare and Medicaid combined: 676 Billion (19%)
I'm not saying Medicaid is nothing; I'm saying it's not even close to Social Security or defense spending as a source of concern.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY...
> Would this be hard and expensive for the federal government to do? It shouldn't be. The mathematical formula to do this is very simple. The Social Security Administration does this every year ... This would be far easier. It could also be done online. An IRS website should be available so people could key in the amount they pay in taxes and a receipt pops up showing several dozen recognizable programs and the amount that went to each of them
Your point, I take it, is about government resistances and inefficiencies, and spot on. But it wouldn't have to be the government to do this. The information is available. Thirdway, or anyone, could do it themselves and make it available to any website. A developer could do an app and sell it for a dollar.
edit: that was quick: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745312
1) They aren't redeemable for the promised amount if congress lowers benefits, as it has many times already. We all know that benefits will be lowered significantly (or removed) by the time most of us here reach retirement age. Anyone under 40 should consider the money deducted for Social Security flushed permanently.
2) They are not in projected inflation adjusted dollars. The $1500 per month someone read on the piece of paper is actually in 2060 dollars (for example) not 2010 dollars; if shown in 2010 dollars it would be laughably small.
These sorts of numerical tricks would never be tolerated if a private firm was perpetrating them.
You wrote that with a straight face?
But, just as Madoff eventually ran out of new investors and due to a market dip was unable to continue to pay out the fake proceeds, demographic trends will make the US Government unable to pay out the proceeds promised to all the people who pay payroll tax every paycheck.
Already, the government has cut social security benefits drastically. I'm not talking about harming the rich, these are working class people forced to invest 12.5% of their lifetime earnings into a scheme that has zero guarantees and a history of profligacy.
Note: If you look at income + payroll tax, we don't have nearly as progressive a system as you might imagine. That would perhaps be fine if there were actually a safety net being provided.
RE: Your views on SS in general, is that a populist argument for stronger SS and a more progressive income tax?
I don't have a problem with the government requiring a 12.5% retirement fund outlay from workers. It's paternalistic but probably pragmatic. I do think it should be an investment based program rather than a pyramid scheme, and I do think workers should be guaranteed at least the rate of return of a very conservative market investment (such as a precious metal or a certificate of deposit would yield).
The original genius behind Social Security was that it was not a welfare program, it was sold as an investment program. However the books were cooked from day 1 because it achieved that only due to very skewed demographics (far more young workers than old workers/retirees), just as Madoff's fund was able to pay out returns only on the basis of having far more new investors than investors expecting returns.
So I'm opposed to the regressive nature of the Social Security tax mainly because the program is broken and thus it's only a regressive tax and not an investment program. Obama ran on a campaign promise of turning social security into a welfare program which simply means preventing the program from going bankrupt by deciding that only those who are deemed poor get the funds promised them.
Imagine if Madoff had tried to avoid jail by saying that he'd refund the money of all the poor people who invested with him. That's equally laughable.
Sadly, turning it into a welfare program is probably the most pragmatic approach, but if we're going to do that we should immediately do away with the payroll tax and allow the scheme to end so that those who don't aspire to be poor can start investing their 12.5% into an actual IRA. It would be fine with me if income tax rates had to rise a bit to cover the cost of Soc Sec as welfare.
As far as the finances, as I understand things, simply raising the cap on income would extend things out a bit, FICA doesn't get collected past 105k or something. That's also redistributive and you could say unfair, but the fact is that we have a big population bump retiring and no system to pay for their retirement is going to be fair to us.
EDIT: Also, I suspect any other mandated market investment that the government enforced would have even worse problems than SS. What happens when all of the baby boomers put daily selling pressure on the stock (or gold) market for 30 years? That might wind up being a way worse investment when it comes to the market prices at sell time, no matter how well the economy does.
I don't approve of raising the income cap because that fails to address the regressive nature of the tax. It also fails to address the larger issue, which is the vulnerability of the program to demographic shifts and congress's whims, including the oft-used whim of spending the current surplus on other things to avoid having to raise taxes now for current spending.
I think the best solution would be to give workers below a certain age the option of opting out of the pay-go program and instead choosing an investment based program curated by the government but with an ownership component. The missing revenue should just be paid for via our progressive income tax regime.
Since benefits are roughly related to FICA, extending the cap doesn't help much. It helps some, because the benefits system is progressive, in that folks who contribute a lot get less return on their contributions than folks who contribute just a little, but ....
The folks who designed SS thought that the cap was essential. Their argument was that SS wouldn't survive if it paid folks like Ross Perot $500k/year in benefits or if it was a tax with no benefits to folks like Ross Perot. The cap means that Perot doesn't get $500k/year but don't care because he didn't put much in.
Are they wrong?
The inception of the program was based on a variety of too good to be true premises, the 1% payroll tax being the most notable, so I interpret the cap more as a symptom of this fantasy... and possibly a consideration of the stigma attached to welfare programs in those days.
If you want to remove the cap, then either you're willing to pay Ross Perot $500k/year in benefits or you're going to have uncapped taxes and capped benefits, that is, another 15% tax.
Do you really think that rich people today won't object to another 15% tax?
No it wouldn't, your concept of pyramid scheme is flawed. By your definition, all insurance is a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes promise everyone they'll get out more than they put in and this eventually collapses. Social Security makes no such promise, it's insurance, they fully expect many people to die before getting out what they put in or even starting to get anything out at all. That's how any insurance works. Social Security is not a pyramid scheme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
Insurance is not a scheme "destined to collapse" when it runs out of new investors. Insurance is perfectly sustainable. In fact, some of the oldest companies in business today are insurance companies.
Social security is currently "designed to collapse" as the trustees report has warned for years. The program will run out of money sometime fairly soon unless the benefits are cut or the taxes raised. In fact, it has already collapsed several times and a new program has been reinvented, also named Social Security. Initially the payroll tax was 1% and the benefits constituted enough to live on.
On your last point, you're simply making that up. Assuming you live long enough to reach retirement age, you will get benefits. The idea that you won't get benefits is based on absurd projections that wrongly assume the retirement age will never change. That's simply not going to happen, benefits/age will simply be adjusted to compensate and keep the program for those within a few years of the average lifespan, as it was intended.
You've fallen for political scare tactics of those opposed to the very idea of social security because they're opposed to all government assistance and anything even slightly socialist. Benefits simply have to be adjusted so payouts don't exceed payins and we're not using debt to support people. For the boomer generation, that sucks, because they're huge and gen X isn't. For gen X, that's great, because they're small and gen Y is huge.
The problem of course is there's no "there" there. Any funds collected today by payroll taxes, and not used for today's benefits, are lent to the general fund and spent. There are no funds being saved for next year's benefits, much less the current tax payers.
Now, it is true that the Social Security system then holds "assets" in exchange for that cash, namely, government bonds. But this is just accounting fiction.
Imagine you are a new parent and wish to save for your child's college tuition. Here are some scenarios:
A) Every pay day you put some money in a jar. When your child goes to college you take the money out of the jar to pay the tuition.
B) Every pay day you spend every dime. When your child is ready to go to college, you scramble to find the funds to pay the tuition.
C) Every pay day you put some money in a jar, then you replace the money in the jar with an IOU, and spend the money. When your child is ready to go to college, you scramble to find the funds to pay the IOUs to pay the tuition.
There is no substantive difference between B and C.
even more obscene than this fiction is how the Federal Reserve prints money, lends it to the banks, who then lend it to the Treasury and collect 3% for doing so. Its such an obvious subsidy of that whole sector, without which would look much worse.
The point is US T-bills are considered one of the safest investments in the world but when people start talking about SS for some reason they pretend that they are worthless.
The dollar may not enter a hyperinflationary death spiral as some believe it will, but its days as the default world reserve currency appear to be fading fast.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPEK14475620090601
"Chinese assets are very safe," Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s.
His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience, reflecting skepticism in China about the wisdom of a developing country accumulating a vast stockpile of foreign reserves instead of spending the money to raise living standards at home.
Economically, China is playing Chess, the US is playing Checkers. China is more than willing to sacrifice one or two generations of people to gain global dominance. The people controlling the US economy think in periods of 4 or 10 years.
D) Your child spends his/her high-school years mowing lawns, doing part-time jobs, etc, in order to save some money to help pay their way through college. You encourage them to do so. The money earned is put in a jar. You take that money, replace it with an IOU, and use it to pay for household expenses along with more frivolous things. Now it's college time and you scramble to find the money to pay the IOUs.
I am naively assuming that what backs the value of a t-bill is the US government's ability to accrue future tax revenue to pay it back.
What is it that makes a t-bill owed to Social security an investment rather than a tax deficit when it comes time to cut a social security check?
The above is roughly how the system works now, makes sense right?
Of course, you'll see various peopl with an axe to grind calling it a pyramid scheme for the pass-thru payout. And claim that the government is "raiding" the trust fund by selling it t-bills, or say that the trust fund is backed by quote "worthless IOUs". I didn't know t-bills were so disreputable! But aside from the silly rhetoric, it's a pretty sensible strategy.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the people who administer the program 40 hours a week actually kinda know what they're doing. Unless you come to the conversation pre-equipped with ideology and blinders.
There's a macroeconomic issue, as well--if you just let that money sit in an account for years on end, the money supply gets fucked up. Money just disappearing into a hole is essentially deflationary, and deflation is catastrophic. Then, when the money comes back out again, you have inflation (possibly hyperinflation if the amount is big enough). Better to hold onto that money somehow while still keeping the money supply relatively constant--in other words, invest the money somehow.
For very similar reasons, it's much more difficult for the government to carry reserves of funds from year to year than it is for them to carry a debt.
And in a short 5 years the direction changes because 2015 is when SS outflow is expected to exceed inflow and they have to start using some of the interest income off those bonds. In 2025 the inflows and interest income become insufficient and the SS trust fund has to start selling the bonds and by 2035 the assets are themselves exhausted.
The 2010 OASDI Trustees Report http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TR/2010/tr2010.pdf
You used the word "lent". Note that that is different from the word "given with no expectation of repayment". Care to revise your second sentence in light of your first?
No, there's no fiction - legally it must be paid back. That's why Social Security debt is included in the gross national debt.
The first addresses the "accounting fiction" aspect.
I haven't added the numbers up myself, but one of the comments says that the listed things add up to only sixty-something percent of the total. Where's the other money gone? One might almost think they're trying to make a political point with their careful selection of items (eg. "Combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan" somehow got to fifth place on the list while "bailouts" and "stimulus" are entirely missing despite this being 2009).
Anyway, I certainly wouldn't trust the government to give me a receipt which said "selected items" -- deceptive information is worse than no information.
Also, since the US federal expenditure is currently about 25% larger than tax receipts, how is this taken into account?
>4 Budget calculations are based on budget allocations obtained from the Office of Management and Budget using historical tables from the FY2011 budget submission as well as the Congressional Budget Office website for such items as interest on the debt, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
My guess is that the real cause of "selected items" is that the number of things paid for by your taxes are obviously much larger than could fit on a short list, and has a long tail.
Well, of course that depends how you slice it. Break it down by department and it looks more like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_categor...
The twenty-something listed departments account for 97% of the budget (of course there's other government spending which isn't listed explicitly in the budget, I suppose).
This doesn't, of course, include stuff like "Smithsonian Museum", which are included on this list to make people feel warm and fuzzy about paying their taxes.
Somewhat disingenuous from a think tank called the "Third Way", which was originally intended to imply centrism. Still, it's a general law of NPR reporting that a left-wing think tank is called a "think tank" and a right-wing think tank is called a "right-wing think tank".
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but a quick search suggests you may be mistaken. [site:npr.org "right-wing think tank"] os 8 results; [site:npr.org "think tank"] has about 2380. Nothing funny in robots.txt.
But you never know, maybe there aren't that many transcripts on there or something...
Still, a bit more googling:
7 hits for "right-wing think tank" vs 4 hits for "left-wing think tank", so apparently they don't use either term very often.
1200 hits for "liberal think tank" vs 285 for "conservative think tank" vs 447 for "libertarian think tank" (all of which seem to be Cato) vs 6 for "moderate think tank".
3 for "Republican think tank", 345 for "Democratic think tank" and 57 for "non-partisan think tank"
I take your point, though. What you'd really need to do in order to analyze bias would be to check out "think tank" is used without an adjective and figure out what kind of think tanks those are.
The empirical evidence shows that, for example, NPR is more likely to interview a conservative economist about a story than a liberal. I think they go out of their way to defer to right-of-center politicians because they are so afraid of the perception that they're liberal.
In short, I think you're wrong.
To be meaningful, we'd need to compare the ratio of conservative economists on NPR to conservative economists in the population.
Leaving out specific items is an obvious way to work an agenda into it, but manipulating the groupings could do the same thing, and more subtly at that. With a little gerrymandering, the receipt could say pretty much anything.
The IRS seems plenty good at figuring out how much I should have paid in taxes and hounding me about it. Why not do those calculations in February and send me a bill:
"We calculated that you owe $14,278 in taxes this year. Please submit payment along with the stub below. Alternately, you may choose to submit a tax return for our review."
Government gets their money. I save a bit of hassle in April. Sorted.
I mean sure, they'd end up overcharging you by a few percent, but really that amounts to <$1,000. My time is worth a lot more to me than that. Send me a bill telling me what I owe and I'll pay it.
In the case of a refund, it might even take the form of a check that, if cashed signifies your intention not to file a return.
The US has a $700 Billion ANNUAL military budget (more than every other country combined).
Something is being hidden in other numbers because of all the cost to support military and their families (taxpayer paid "free" housing?) and thousands of military are coming back with traumatic injuries that previously would have been a one-time funeral cost but now are surviving with extremely expensive, continuous medical support and therapy costs (and disability pay for them/family).
Where is the "homeland security" portion in that receipt? Are we to believe the billions in security theater at airports is free and not funded by taxes? What about the billions doled out to local governments under the guise of "homeland security" so law enforcement can buy new toys to abuse?
Where are the secret military projects budget in that receipt (like their own space shuttle, military satellites and other stuff we aren't supposed to know about so their budgets are hidden?)
There's also other types of taxes paid by non-individuals, like corporate taxes, estate taxes, and the like.
In any case, it means the numbers in their receipt for SS and Medicare are off by a factor of 2, so you should evaluate this only based on the idea, not on their actual numbers. (Not to mention there are likely an abundance of other problems with this method, like spending that is not part of the budget, or when the government is over-budget and issues bonds to pay for it.)
As you get more data you could maybe make it possible to drill down to get more detail too.
"At best, motivated taxpayers can locate a pie chart on a government website that gives percentage allocations about how large categories of spending are distributed.
But these are difficult to find and difficult to understand."
This is disingenuous puffery. It's in every copy of the 1040 instructions and is simple to understand.
They're actually suggesting a far more complex and entirely non-visual spending report. That's useful, but the existing report is neither hard to find nor understand.
This is a brilliant idea, and in the spirit of a democratic republic, I'd say. I'm paying taxes; it'd be nice to know what exactly I'm paying for.
I'm also for listing all the expenses; down to the ones that end up costing you a millicent.
Perhaps yet more feasible would be setting up a real tax website, with real information, and accessible tax records for all. On this website you could also find your receipt. If only…
First, what is suggested in this article is not a receipt, but a breakdown. A sales receipt for a car, for example, doesn't start out, "5 tires (4 on vehicle, 1 spare), 2 axles..." It just doesn't work that way. You buy "government" with your taxes.
Even if you did get an itemized receipt for a car, that would be far easier than what's proposed here. You can always just point to the car and account for the parts. The part is either there or not, and meets specifications or not. The reason that government and spending are these intractable issues is that the parts can be arguably there or not, and arguably working or not.
As long as you can't opt out of all or a portion of your taxes, in other words, as long as tax policy is sane, the only "receipt" you should get should specify that you paid the amount you calculated. Any other discussion or education about costs and allotment should happen in a forum that at least has a chance of shedding some real light.
Finally, if the receipt ever became the focus of public attention, politicians will just monkey with the categories until you're happy again. It will cease to be an information tool and become an influence tool. It will merely add another layer of intractability to an already byzantine bureaucratic system.
One item that caught my eye was spending on the DEA of only $3.14: Wikipedia puts yearly spending on law enforcement related to the War On Drugs at about $44 billion [1] and gross federal tax revenue for 2009 at about $2.1 trillion [2]. This works out to roughly 2% of tax revenue spent on the War On Drugs. For the $5,400 of federal income tax in the linked example that would work out to more like $100 rather than $3, no?
Of course, the Wikipedia article doesn't state how much of the $44 billion goes to the DEA and how much goes to other law enforcement agencies.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Costs_to_taxpayers
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Ma...
Furthermore the USA has some other forms of revenue. Such as tarriffs and fines. Put that together and I can believe that the figure given is reasonable.
Their 2009 appropriations were $2.6bn.
Considering the nature of the War on Drugs I'd expect most of the expenditure to be at the local and state level, but the biggest chunks at the federal level aside from the DEA's budget would probably be the proportion of Coast Guard and CBP time and resources dedicated to counter-drug operations and the military and policing aid given to countries like Mexico and Colombia. This is a bit hard to quantify though, as the Coast Guard and CBP usually conduct counter-drug operations as part of their usual duties and not all the aid being sent to Colombia and Mexico is motivated solely by the desire to contain drug production and shipment.
So you would not necessarily find the remaining funding hidden within the federal budget.
Always fun to see a project you were involved surface on NPR. ;)
It seemed like it would make people grateful that they had that service, but it also might make the people who pay disproportionately more than they use angry (and the nature of insurance is that most people put in more than they get)
Given the choice, I would much rather pay more for healthcare than I am using. It means I am healthy. My health is more valuable than money.
Every television ad for the first four months of the year would probably be some variation on:
"Remember, the FBI does good work! Be sure to remember to contribute to the FBI on your next tax return!"
I also don't realistically believe this will ever happen.
Also, I'm not sure why making government departments beg for money and have to live in the free market is on the face of it a bad thing. Would it be any different than the current system, where politicians beg us for money while promising to allocate our taxes a particular way, but then usually fail to follow through completely on? Having the departments beg for money directly seems more efficient somehow.
Of course, I think what would really suffer is bold new infrastructure programs. People would be willing to allocate money to roads once a couple high profile bridges collapse, but would we ever see a space elevator?
(The rest of the time it'll still be ads for medications for diseases you never knew you had.)
In fact, I want it online and I want to be able to drill down as far as I want into the data.
Of course, my desire for such a thing is balanced by the fact that such a project if carried out in the same way as most public sector IT projects would probably cost a hundred billion and not actually work.
Regardless of your political views, left or right, this shows you what the priorities of our government are.
After the S&L crisis in the 80s, over 1000 banksters and fraudsters were convicted and imprisoned. Why is it that none have been convicted and imprisoned now?
Besides, it's probably also not that useful to do. From now on, you can expect banks to do a little more verification, so creating disincentives for mortgage application fraud is not that pressing an issue.
Setting aside money for "Low Income K-12 students" or Foreign Aid or Amtrak (with prices as high as flying and quadruple the travel time) does not necessarily mean that investment is getting results.
I'd only trust a receipt like this if it were annotated with hard numbers on how my dollars turn into meaningful progress.
Such a policy would give people a sense of power over the money they're paying. I, for one, would begrudge less the paying of taxes if the monies went to programs important to me.
2. You make that sound like a bad thing, when it's not.
Given the categories listed on the receipt, which one of those would you really be upset if a rich person decided to put 51% of his taxes to? Medicaid? Pell Grants? How about the National Parks?
"If the wars are important to you, use your money to pay for it, stop using mine," is pretty much my philosophy. Having no control over where my taxes go makes me significantly less pleased with paying them.
26.5 cents/military, 20.1c/health, 13.6c/debt, 3.5c/vets, 2c/edu
We are doing the same thing today. My grandchildren will be paying for the school repair and high-speed rail bonds that passed a couple of years ago here in California. Their grandchildren will be paying off the anti-global-warming school air conditioning and hyper mag-lev rail bonds that will be put forth 25 years from now.
A few issues: It should also indicate how much money was actually spent on said item (in the event of deficit spending).
sometimes mind boggeling number - e.g., several thousand euro for a short hospital stay - sometimes zero.
Would also like to see:
Return policy - don't like how much the government spent on Amtrak, get a refund (no questions asked).
Customer loyalty program - earn points towards postage stamps or a national park pass.
Discounts from partner programs - i.e., paying, loyal customers of the US government get discounts with China, GM, Goldman Sachs and other US 'partners'.
The counter to THAT is that people would just ask for the largest amount to be returned to them (Take that, Social Security!)
In all seriousness, transparency in government spending would be most welcome.