I've been thinking about a new Tax System that may actually work. If I'm completely wrong for a little fact I didn't consider then just call me out on it. But hear me out. So in today's society one pays their taxes each month/year to finance different government programs and also to pay the salaries of public officials and whatnot. It's pretty simple right? Pay x % of your income and in return you receive different 'amenities' that improve your daily life. In some countries it seems to work in some not, that's beyond the point. One inconvenient with this system is that the amount of expenses being made by the government in a established period of time is so large that no one actually goes up and start calculating how much income the government had in this period of time, how much of it it used and how efficiently the sum was used. Everybody just takes as an axiom that taxes must be paid and hope that the government allocated this money efficiently.
NEW TAX SYSTEM
Now this, as we all know, it's an
inefficient system, and like I said some countries do it better than others but overall it's a money wasting machine. And if you think about it it's actually hindering progress and wealth creation because people are essentially giving money to an institution that proceeds to wrongly allocate a % and this means lost money which could have been transformed into new jobs or assets for a factory. When calculating at the macro scale this actually results on a huge economic hindrance for most countries. If taxes were easier to do people would be able to know if the government should be taking debt, they should know where exactly does their money goes, they would say 'I pay my taxes with pleasure'. But that's not the case. Taxes are purposefully done so that only a small percentage of the population actually knows how to do them and therefor understand how the machine works. If everyone knew they were essentially throwing their money out the window they would stop paying taxes.
At this point I would like to point out that I'm not a libertarian or anything I'm writing this purely to know if such a system could work or not. So onto the system. It's quite simple actually. We stop this system in which everyone has to pay for everything and rather transform it into a 'you pay X government program and you pay X government program'. So how would that work? You pay every month your taxes, like in the actual system, but instead of paying it to the IRS you pay it to the San Francisco County Jail for example. The total amount you pay stays the same obviously but in this system you can actually control were your money goes to and how it's being used. The IRS would of course disappear or greatly lose power and stay only as a regulating institution which makes sure no tax frauds are being made.
Then we have to open up decentralized offices which oversees the institution it's being assigned to control and manage. So for example I pay my taxes directly to the San Francisco County Jail, through an office established uniquely for Taxes being allocated to the Jail program of the country. One could then easily check how much money was allocated to prisons in total in an established period of time and of that total then see how much was allocated to the San Francisco County Jail. Does it seem too much of an Utopia? In my opinion it's not going to create extra bureaucracy because it would be more decentralized so it would run smoother. It's basically splitting up the IRS into smaller offices that don't communicate between each other because they don't need to since each office has it's own branch they have to manage so taxes for education,for example, have nothing to do with those of Jail programs. Any problem I didn't take into account?
The logistics would render this impossible and extremely expensive, there are more public services than you realise and some would be more popular than others, leading to funding problems. You pay taxes and then see expenditure reports to see where your money goes and vote to chose where your money is paid.
Simply put, this is impossible.
Problem would be that you end up with some institutions being totally overfunded why others that seem less important on first glance go bankrupt.
If the tax payer decides, then every single cent goes into education, police and infrastructure.
tl;dr
we have a system where you can decide where you spend 1% of your taxes among a bunch of civic organizations, like animal shelters, cancer treatment orgs or schools
if you could run the most basic and necessary government services from 50% of all taxes (impossible) then you could give the choice of the other half to the taxpayer
realistically this 50% would end up in the hands of the very local community and feely goody social orgs
It'd backlash.
Nice Reddit spacing nigger, now fuck off back to the gas chamber.
That's what I'm trying to say. The funding stays the same. The IRS would only corroborate the budget of each institution in order to keep money flowing but not in excess for any institution. If the system could be implement billions of dollars would be saved in many countries which in turn can be used to cover the overfunding of some institutions if it ever happened.
And I realize the amount of programs there are in existence so that's why you have to generalize. So all universities and school go under an education office. All jails under a jail office. All healthcare and welfare to a health office. It would be way easier to control than having a single federal institution doing all the work don't you think?