7 ms·

At the risk of sounding like I'm overgeneralizing, fines and tickets should not go into the budget at all. Things like sin taxes make me uneasy. I cant believe

• Intermernet 11y ago
  This is idealistic of me, but I always think that this money should be exclusively earmarked for public education and health purposes. It's a fairly reliable way of getting something positive from the "wages of sin".
  • thaumasiotes 11y ago
    If you believe naive statistics, giving US public schools extra money makes the students perform worse. (Obviously, what's going on is that extra money is being given to the schools with the worst students. But it's not at all obvious that spending extra money at a school makes the education any better than it was.)
  • hibikir 11y ago
    It doesn't matter exactly where you put it, but who happens to be one level above that. Imagine I am in charge of a budget for two departments. One I really like, and want to give it as much money as possible, and the other I do not, so I want to give them the smallest budget possible that keeps them running. Imagine you do not like that, and start giving X amount money to that department. When the next budget comes along, I'll just lower their budget by X, and give it to another department. The end result is that all you did was let me give more money to the department I like. You can tell yourself your money really helped your favorite department though, but unless you gave them more money than their old budget, you didn't help them at all.