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It seems where you are going is forcing a lot of Government to basically run GoFundMe campaigns for their non-essential programs. This might be a good thing and
by dwd 8y ago
It seems where you are going is forcing a lot of Government to basically run GoFundMe campaigns for their non-essential programs. This might be a good thing and in a lot of cases the chief backers may be philanthropists, public and private trusts and interest groups.
Issues that you will come across are:
- Deciding on what are essential services and the base level of the money they require
- Overfunding (everyone giving a favourite department too much money)
- Selling programs that are not sexy or exciting, hard to grasp and offer more indirect or secondary benefits (bike-shedding problem)
- Funding of base research into technology that could be 20-50 years away.
- Meeting international treaty funding obligations
- Preventative programs
and the big one: Funding (or not funding) the social safety net
If it is cheaper model as far as the bureaucratic cost, and helps with transparency as far as where your money goes, great!
- elamje 8y agoYeah, there are definitely issues determining what the essential government costs are, so let’s assume that system is in place and works well. I agree about the underfunding and overfunding point. However, I can imagine a community like HN would maybe dump more money into research and tech related things, and would be happy doing it. There will be niche funding groups for various sexy and unsexy organizations, and the nice thing is, people will be happier to “give” the government some of their income, rather than watch it get wasted in a black box. It’s definitely difficult to minimize rich having too much financial power in this system, but it could possibly use a system analogous to the bicameral legislature where big states are limited in power by every state getting the same number of senators.