The great thing about is you can start doing it today - you don't have to wait for a gridlocked, highly polarized federal legislative body to come to some pork-filled "compromise".
The problem with effective altruism is that it requires people to invest in things that sometimes would go against their own personal interests. For example I have no reason to invest my money in improving the public transit of towns I can never see myself living in, instead I would invest that money in places that I or my family lives in.
The flaw of course is that it leads to companies heavily investing only in regions where they're located which are usually heavily gentrified and upper-class neighborhoods.
I'm not making an argument against taxation here. Ostensibly, the reason we have taxes is that many people would not chip in if they weren't forced (free rider problem). It's hard to imagine that anyone would sign up for a SaaS-style military service.
The OP, by their own admission, is not a free rider - they're ready to help! And there are many immediate ways to help in a way that is, empirically, more efficient than taxes that would fund public institutions in the United States. The other great thing about that approach, aside from speed and efficiency, is that there's no long, drawn-out gridlock associated with getting your money into the system. Year-long political fights that result in maybe a .5% increase in a band of income tax is...let's call it a process.
To wrap up/sum up, people that want to give can make better spending decisions than the government generally has shown. This is not a replacement for taxation since most people do not seem to want to give to charities.
Because for example let's say I wanted to put my money towards having proper healthcare for everyone. What action would be more effective: wanting people in my wealth bracket to be taxed more, or donating my income to charity?
Donating your income to charity, for the sole reason that "wanting people in your wealth bracket to pay more taxes" isn't an action, it's the desired outcome. Voting would be an action. Activism would be an action. The simple desire is not an action. It's one thing to say, "I want to be taxed more", knowing that your declaration is not likely to have any impact on the reality of the situation. Saying, "I'm writing a 10,000 dollar check to a malaria or deworming charity" (of which there are many: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities) is an action.
> Okay, since you're said the magic word 'empirically' I would like you to cite your studies and evidence that proves your position.
I think you understand that paying 10 dollars for a person's meal is more efficient than having 6,000 administrators facilitate the transfer of that 10 dollars to a person. Every person you add to the process wants their cut, which is why any organization (private, public, government, corporate) becomes less efficient. They can make up for that efficiency in scale, but scale comes at a price. And, again, I haven't advocated for the elimination of taxes, I'm just giving the OP an actionable option that will do more than his desire to be taxed at a higher rate.
There are not a lot of great studies I could find that compare the efficacy of "tax + welfare" vs "charity", other than libertarian-ish journals that you probably won't view as valid.