‘Tis the season to fill out your tax forms — and, for many Americans, to complain about all the tax dollars that disappear into the maw of what they see as an indifferent government. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Democracy‘s Ethan Porter has a great idea to increase Americans’ sense of investment in their government:
[L]et’s offer individual taxpayers a clear breakdown of what they’re getting in return for their taxes. The IRS should provide individual taxpayers with a receipt. To be as accurate a reflection of spending as possible, such a receipt would be mailed at the beginning of the year following the April 15 deadline. So, for example, I would receive a receipt for my 2009 tax return, filed in 2010, in the beginning of 2011 estimating where my money has gone thus far, and will go until I file my next return. Soon after, the president would unveil a new budget resolution, and, as April loomed, the process would begin again.
By necessity, such a receipt would be an estimate, broken down according to what each taxpayer had paid the previous April. (Only the portion of the budget consisting of money generated by individual taxpayers would be deconstructed for each person.) The receipt would necessarily represent a bit of an oversimplification–the federal budget is a monstrously complicated thing. For our purposes, comprehensibility, as opposed to comprehensiveness, should be prized. The text should be simple, and the accompanying graph should be clear. We have the capacity to do this already: Today, numerous outside groups, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities probably the best among them, produce material along these lines. But they don’t do so in accordance with the federal government, and their work isn’t distributed to every taxpayer.
If done right, a receipt could have powerful and lasting consequences. It would make clear the enormous amount of goods and services provided by the government.
Even as conservatives have launched a largely successful crusade against taxes over the last couple of decades, public demand for services that the government provides hasn’t waned. The result is a disconnect: anger at the level of taxation — which has already been generally decreasing since the 1970s — and yet a steady expectation of goods and services from a government that relies on taxpayer money to sustain itself.
Considering the misconceptions the public has about where their taxpayer money goes, Porter’s idea could be a great corrective to the conservative narrative of a government squandering its tax dollars or prioritizing areas of less importance to them. As Porter points out, Americans tend to overestimate how much of the money goes toward things like welfare and foreign aid. When confronted with the fact that those numbers are actually small compared to other expenses like national defense and Social Security, taxpayers may see the check that they’re dropping in the mailbox every spring in a whole new light.
It’s no secret that the U.S. is going to have to find new ways to cut spending or raise revenues to steer us off our current path of fiscal disaster. An informed taxpayer might be more realistic about the hard choices necessary on both sides of the budgetary ledger. A receipt for our tax dollars will make for a less inflamed electorate — and, by extension, plant the seeds for a more reasonable fiscal politics.