The bigger point, that the receipt is somewhat deceptive by breaking defense down into palatable chunks, is quite true. What they should do is simply present “defense” as one lump showing its true budgetary impact of 23% or so. If people realized that we spend literally a full one quarter of our federal budget on defense (that’s including the ongoing wars and operations) I think their views would change. One significant problem in the US is voter ignorance. I doubt very much that a majority of Americans could guess the defense budget within a factor of 25% variation or so, and I also doubt that a majority of Americans realize we spend nearly one half of all military expenditures in the world, or that we spend 700% what our nearest military spending competitor spends.
So if you had a tax receipt that honestly listed categories of spending, it would be helpful. Problem is, as the receipt used above shows, people are going to try to spin the receipts into something less than honest. But I think it wouldn’t be that hard to have one of the non-partisan technocractic institutions like the Congressional Budget Office prodcue a receipt that is least nominally honest. Also, as Jason says, for the average voter it would need to be presented in chart form showing relative chunks; too many Americans are too inumerate to understand the difference between $1,000,000,000,000 and $125,000,000,000. For the average person showing that example with a chart showing the first category as eight times the height of the second category is going to a much higher chance of comprehension of the true relative numbers.
Seems like the US Social Security Administration think there are six areas they pay money too, including medicare. So medicare has been taken out of social security in this receipt, for some reason, like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been taken from defense spending, which itself has been completely discarded as a category. All I’m saying is that it seems pretty easy to decide yourself how to display the spending on the receipt to push a political message.
Oh sure, you can play games of any sort by exploiting the comparison tricks people are bad at. People in the US almost always mean only those two programs by “Social Security”, though.
Lets say you’re opposed to military action. Well your taxes go towards social programs. The right wing guy down the street who thinks Social Security isn’t worth having? His go towards military spending.
For every person who opposes some sort of spending, you could probably find someone who supports it.
What I’d like instead of a receipt is a form where I get to choose where my taxes go. So at the end of the year when you calculate tour tax, you copy this number over to the top of a new IRS form. On this form there are percentage boxes where you can allocate which departments and programs get your taxes.
I wonder if you did this who would get more money and who would get less. Would defense still be so big? Would the national endowment for the arts get their budget slashed, or get it tripled?
Even some kind of non binding survey would be an interesting tool to use.
maybe give a bit of an option: take three bucks off the top and give like ten options to allocate: military($1), ss, debt reduction($1.50), corn subsidy, chinese hooker alcohol research, irs crackdown on tax dodgers (.50)…
