I live in the United States and work a salaried job.
A full third of my income goes to taxes.
Federal Taxes account for one fourth of that.
Put another way, if all taxes were eliminated, I would make one and a half times more.
However, I don't think paying taxes is a bad thing.
I believe that it is my duty as an American, and as a Human, to pitch in to help with the bigger picture.
- I want to live in a country where the sick are taken care of.
- I want to live in a country where our eldest and most vulnerable are protected.
- I want to live in a country where every man or woman who works in a dangerous, high stress environment, is rewarded for their courage and taken care of after tragedy strikes.
- I want to live in a country where the basic infrastructure of our civilization is consistently being improved.
- I want to live in a country where statistics like "Americans waste half of the food they produce" leads to outrage while the poorest go hungry in the streets.
- I want to live in a country where bridges stop falling down.
- I want to live in a country where a police officer cannot shoot an unarmed, unresisting civilian, engineer a story, and return to work shortly thereafter.
- I want to live in a country where the education and growth of children is the priority of the populace. "Don't make the mistakes we did, help us undo them."
- I want to live in a country where we accept newcomers with open arms, embrace them for wanting to be a part of this America we all help build, and empower them to follow the American dream to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
- I want to live in a country where I feel comfortable walking around at night.
- I want to live in a country where every man, woman, and child aspires to vote intelligently in every election.
- I want to live in a country where we hold our elected representatives accountable for the results of their actions.
- I want to live in a country that strives to enrich the lives of its citizens.
- I want to live in a country that enables citizens to live atypical lifestyles while still contributing to society.
- I want to live in a country that actively speaks out against human rights abuses.
- I want to live in a country that doesn't feel the need to jail a significant portion of the population.
- I want to live in a country that ensures that Abu Ghraib level offenses to human dignity stop happening, not by punishing those involved, but by changing the system such that they could never, ever happen again.
- I want to live in a country that doesn't use a robot to kill a wedding party on the other side of the planet.
America is a great country to live in, but we need to demand more progress towards these ideals.
Through taxes, I pay someone else to worry about these things and try to change them.
These things aren't changing fast enough, and by law I cannot stop paying taxes.
What I propose is something a little bit different.
I want to know what my taxes are enabling. Specifically, I want to know where the dollars I spend end up. Did I support our national forests, or did my money go to a government defense contractor?
I understand that the central government is an abstraction which sucks up money and redistributes it, and so I should be able to look at the budget and know what my taxes are doing.
But the government has so many functions that trying to understand the impact of those numbers is impossible for me to do.
So instead, I want to be able to trace my dollars, in increments of $100, from my taxes to specific initiatives the government funds. The more specific, the better.
If my money gives a family in Oakland food stamps, that's money well spent.
If my money gives a teacher in Idaho chromebooks for her class, that's money well spent.
If my money pays the salary of soldiers who rape innocents, that's money poorly spent, and I need my country to change or I will leave.
I want to have a status report for progress on all of these issues. The government is accountable to the American people.
Without greater transparency on the results of government initiatives that we pay for, we cannot ask the intelligent questions we need to in order to hold the government accountable.
I have no idea. This is a rant.
There's two pieces to such a system. The most important piece tracks the flow of money into, between, and out of the government's ledgers. The less important piece packages up that data nicely and distributes it to the American public.
Note that there can be no financial accountability without the first piece.
Also, I know nothing about financial policy, so I could be comnpletely wrong.