3 ms·

Do you police, educate or fight fires on your own dime?

adventured 5y ago
Can we please try that experiment for once, letting people decide exactly what they want to do with the the taxed portion of their income, in terms of where they want to allocate it? We won't change or reduce their taxes, we'll let them choose where to direct it. (hint: military spending to name one thing, would be cut in half; the monsters in DC, the globalists and forever-war advocates that dominate both parties and have us de facto occupying Syria right now, would never allow this) Now that would be a glorious, worthy experiment. Of course everybody - without exception - knows the outcome ahead of time.
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  We’ve done the experiment with firefighting over and over again. It doesn’t end well...
  - stale2002 5y ago
    You misunderstood their point. They were not asking for firefighters to be privatized. Instead they were asking for people to be allowed to earmark their tax revenue. So, someone could move their money from military spending, and put it in firefighting, for example.
    - kasey_junk 5y ago
      That will almost certainly mean critical services won’t be funded. We can see this with “school choice” initiatives. When they pass those that pay for private school remove their funds from the public school coffers. Firefighting is the same. If I’ve put in place fire prevention equipment & paid for insurance why should I fund public firefighting?
      - stale2002 5y ago
        > why should I fund public firefighting? I think quite a lot of people would choose to divert their military tax dollars to firefighting. > remove their funds from the public school coffers. I think that many more people would choose to put their tax dollars into public schools, than they would other things, such as the military.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  For a long time police and firefighting were essentially private services. It was horrible. In the US the public can't really choose to meaningfully allocate money for public health. It's catastrophically expensive.
- anoonmoose 5y ago
  lol, military spending would go down a lot more than 50%
- notriddle 5y ago
  The ballot box is supposed to be that "earmarking" system. If it's not working, fix it. The problem with directly earmarking taxes is that whoever pays more taxes gets more control over government spending. People with more money already have too much control of the government; I would rather not support policies that make it even worse.
- tptacek 5y ago
  My prediction is "the collapse of society", because past the waste and corruption there is also a pretty mind-boggling amount of expertise that goes into allocating dollars to projects, and, if you're delegating to individual voters the task of replicating that expertise, you're not going to end up with a functioning NOAA, FSIS, FDA, NERC, &c. Beyond just knowing what NERC is, you have the coordination problem of knowing which worthy agencies need prioritized funding. This is an idea that's trendy in local government, especially among progressives; "participatory budgeting". I don't think it's going to work much better in municipal government, but you can watch and see whether the participatory budgets outperform the competently-managed ones. The cliched libertarian trope is that all our money goes into the military; the sharper libertarian critique would be that the United States is a health and benefits management provider with an army attached. I don't even know what a "globalist" is, by the way. Maybe you could pry that phrase a little further open for us.

Can we please try that experiment for once, letting people decide exactly what they want to do with the the taxed portion of their income, in terms of where they want to allocate it? We won't change or reduce their taxes, we'll let them choose where to direct it. (hint: military spending to name one thing, would be cut in half; the monsters in DC, the globalists and forever-war advocates that dominate both parties and have us de facto occupying Syria right now, would never allow this) Now that would be a glorious, worthy experiment. Of course everybody - without exception - knows the outcome ahead of time.

kasey_junk 5y ago
We’ve done the experiment with firefighting over and over again. It doesn’t end well...
- stale2002 5y ago
  You misunderstood their point. They were not asking for firefighters to be privatized. Instead they were asking for people to be allowed to earmark their tax revenue. So, someone could move their money from military spending, and put it in firefighting, for example.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    That will almost certainly mean critical services won’t be funded. We can see this with “school choice” initiatives. When they pass those that pay for private school remove their funds from the public school coffers. Firefighting is the same. If I’ve put in place fire prevention equipment & paid for insurance why should I fund public firefighting?
    - stale2002 5y ago
      > why should I fund public firefighting? I think quite a lot of people would choose to divert their military tax dollars to firefighting. > remove their funds from the public school coffers. I think that many more people would choose to put their tax dollars into public schools, than they would other things, such as the military.
Daishiman 5y ago
For a long time police and firefighting were essentially private services. It was horrible. In the US the public can't really choose to meaningfully allocate money for public health. It's catastrophically expensive.
anoonmoose 5y ago
lol, military spending would go down a lot more than 50%
notriddle 5y ago
The ballot box is supposed to be that "earmarking" system. If it's not working, fix it. The problem with directly earmarking taxes is that whoever pays more taxes gets more control over government spending. People with more money already have too much control of the government; I would rather not support policies that make it even worse.
tptacek 5y ago
My prediction is "the collapse of society", because past the waste and corruption there is also a pretty mind-boggling amount of expertise that goes into allocating dollars to projects, and, if you're delegating to individual voters the task of replicating that expertise, you're not going to end up with a functioning NOAA, FSIS, FDA, NERC, &c. Beyond just knowing what NERC is, you have the coordination problem of knowing which worthy agencies need prioritized funding. This is an idea that's trendy in local government, especially among progressives; "participatory budgeting". I don't think it's going to work much better in municipal government, but you can watch and see whether the participatory budgets outperform the competently-managed ones. The cliched libertarian trope is that all our money goes into the military; the sharper libertarian critique would be that the United States is a health and benefits management provider with an army attached. I don't even know what a "globalist" is, by the way. Maybe you could pry that phrase a little further open for us.