Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.
POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=expel
POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=elect&candidate=329183Doesn't support write quite like that yet ;)
Just the line items of potential things to spend money on, and citizens indicating their preferences, without any emotive rhetoric to color their choices.
Since my personal discussions with people end up with a lot of agreement on how much one should be allocating to things like education, R&D, infrastructure and healthcare, but it all seems to go pear shaped when it reaches the voting floor, due to the large role external, non-voting actors can play in shaping those decisions.
I don't want a hundred million here and there to go to rubbish projects as a sop to a politician with a certain amount of influence who just received a donation to add an extension to his house.
Of course, now you have the problem of how things end up on the list to vote on :)
People will vote to lower their car registration fees if you let them, then they'll complain that the roads are falling apart. It's fun to watch if you can step back and simply watch it happening.
But someone should indeed implement such a thing - if they can attract enough traffic, the aggregated preferences would start to become extremely useful, though not always in obvious ways. The only ones I've seen so far tend to be sponsored or created by lobbying groups that want a highlight a particular positive or negative policy outcome - you know, the sort of thing that says 'on current trends, everybody in the US will be employed as a member of the general staff by 2073, and safety razors will have 48 blades.'
...although a recent careless razor purchase turned out to have 6 blades - and I didn't even notice we'd passed 5. So what do I know?