Tax time is approaching in the USA, and for the first time in years I will have to pay rather than get a refund. I did have a windfall this year, though, so I’ll have to send a check to Uncle Sam. This has prompted me to think about income tax, how we pay it, and a possible solution to make it less of a pain in the rear end.
I don’t mind paying my fair share of taxes. I realize that, unless we pay taxes, we can’t have such things as roads and bridges, libraries, public parks, public transit, fire departments, and so on. I don’t mind paying the salaries of police officers and firefighters, or helping a single mom feed her family healthful meals. I do, however, mind having to support brutal apartheid Israel or contribute to corporate welfare – as well as having to pay more because the super-rich and big corporations get fat tax breaks.
Already there is a strident and growing “Tax the Rich” movement. Even some of the 1% agree that they should pay more in taxes. It’s only fair that, the more you earn, the more you cough up. We need to eliminate not only ridiculous tax cuts for the wealthiest, but also close as many loopholes as we can.
That, however, is not the subject of my essay. I recently got an idea for making tax time less, well, taxing. Maybe it isn’t feasible, maybe it’s just a pipe dream, but here goes.
When you fill out your form and discover you have to pony up, what if you could delegate where your money goes? That way you could be sure your hard-earned cash was going where you wanted. What if you could require that X amount of money, or a percentage, went to libraries, and another to schools, and another to Green New Deal projects, and another to pay the salaries of municipal workers? If you didn’t earmark your taxes, the government could decide for itself.
Imagine if we had a system like that. You’ve probably seen the slogan “It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Army has to hold a car wash in order to buy a tank” or some variation of that. What if the defense budget depended on how many taxpayers were willing to support it? On the other hand, selfish conservatives could refuse to pay for SNAP, welfare, WIC, and similar programs. Maybe then there would be less incentive to join anti-government bugnut groups.
However, I can see this will generate problems. First, it will lengthen the tax return forms. Second, which segments of the budget do you put down? How specific do you make each item? Do you have a blanket slot for “Public assistance,” or do you break it down into different programs? And what if people don’t earmark all of the moolah in their check to the IRS? What if people make errors, delegating more cash than they’re actually paying? Finally, adding a feature allowing taxpayers to decide where they want their taxes to go will require a legion of bureaucrats to handle.
An old saw states that there are only two kinds of ideas: good ones, and those that need improvement. Sometimes an idea that needs improvement serves as a stepping stone towards a workable solution.
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