What if you could direct your tax dollars?
Taxes, they are unavoidable. We all have to pay them whether you like it or not (unless of course you lose tons of money, and write those losses off against money earned in the future — Trump). It annoys all of us (the taxes). But what if at tax time, you are told how much you owe, then presented a page of how you want to allocate that money? Support the military, airforce, nasa, cia, nsa, education, arts, planned parent hood, epa, fda, etc? You elect a certain dollar amount for each and then submit your form. Don’t care, select my representatives will choose for me. Wouldn’t that be cool?
What if we already had that? What if that’s what conservatives are fighting for?
Now imagine a government that’s pretty small. It’s only job in place was to protect it’s citizens. Not provide a universal security program, not provide medical insurance, not provide provide art programs, or planned parenthood, or any other social program (i know.. i know.. just hear me out). The business of the government is purely to protect the people from foreign and domestic threats. AND instead of us just paying taxes and being on our marry way. We contribute our before tax dollars to organizations we support such as planned parenthood, pbs, or our retirement such as IRAs and 401ks, or health insurance plans. Don’t support guns, don’t support the NRA. It’s pretty awesome the power here if you think about it. But, I know, you must be laughing at this idea right now because you can only think: “Yeah I would but I don’t have that kind of money, so the organizations wouldn’t be funded without the federal government supporting it”.
Well.. If the government were actually trying to protect the citizens it would be de monopolizing and regulating these industries. It would be allowing competition and encouraging it. It would be giving opportunities to the little businesses and making it more difficult for the larger businesses. If this happened we wouldn’t be seeing this massive discrepancy of wealth. Employees would be treated better and paid better.
How did we get here? How did we get to a place where the general mentality is to pay into a tax system and have programs whether we agree with them or not be provided? How did we get to a point where corporations were dictating our governments actions?
How could we change it?
In the next article I’ll put my thoughts on this, but I would love to hear yours.
And one more thing. Do you think these social programs put in place where honest attempts to try and protect the people from a growing crony capitalistic problem? If so… shouldn’t we confront the root cause and solve it rather then bandaid it with social program fixes?
