I'm still not getting it. Are you saying that some taxes should be ringfenced and only used for the specific purpose of education (and by extension other taxes

I'm still not getting it. Are you saying that some taxes should be ringfenced and only used for the specific purpose of education (and by extension other taxes to other things), and that taxpayers get to see precisely how their proportion of taxes are being spent on that particular thing? In any representative democracy that I know of, the budget (including tax income and government outgoings such as education) is handled by elected representatives of the people. There is no direct connection between a specific tax dollar and a specific public service. Rather, these things are budgeted for in aggregate. The elected representatives are accountable to their electorate for these budgets, not to individual taxpayers. The concept of "How is my money being spent?" is a feature of this aggregated budgeting rather than any specific tracking from specific taxpayer to specific service. Going back to the parent posting, which implied an accountability of legislation (or at least educational administration) to its funders, I don't see how this works in representative democracies such as the US, because the funders are not stockholders in the traditional sense: Their extra tax dollars do not give them extra voting rights. The only way I can imagine that they would have more voting rights is through lobbying and other such methods that bypass traditional electoral accountability. In short, an argument in the form of "Higher net tax payers are not net consumers of government spending, therefore government spending that does not help them does not efficiently help others" assumes either that citizens have an electoral power relative to the tax they pay (which is undemocratic) or that wealth redistribution is broken (in this case or in general).