All my life Washington has been spending enormous amounts of time and money fighting over which programs get funded by the Government. Hundreds of programs live on in the Federal budget because Washington is to busy to pay attention to it, or, more likely, happy to take money from special interests who support a low profile program that is so low profile protecting the program won't come back to bite them in the butt.
An example - I just learned there are lots of little tiny airports around the country that get hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal subsidies - based on a program from decades ago to mitigate the impact of airline deregulation. That program was supposed to expire after 10 years, but special interests and local politicians seeking to bring home some bacon to get reelected have kept it going for decades.
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What if on our Federal income tax filing we got to check on which programs we support or don't support.
Some core programs would have to be exempt, like defense.
But taxpayers could choose to allocate a percentage of their taxes among programs that give away government funds to individuals or businesses. School lunch programs, subsidies for farmers, or oil companies or airports.
Whatever percentage of taxpayers support the program determines the amount of money they get. Below a certain threshhold, say 10% of voters, the program is eliminated.
So programs could plan you wouldn't have every program listed every year, maybe every 8 years. And to keep the tax form short there would be ways you could vote for whole catagories of programs.
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