Xerographica,

I have seen your comments pushing this idea of yours on a number of economics blogs, and I have wanted to reach out to you for some time. Your idea is not obviously a bad one. It is not obviously a right one either! But it does not take such a great deal of imagining to see how allowing taxpayers to allocate their taxes could be an improvement on the current system.

However, your presentation is...imperfect. You need to realize that your idea is weird and a substantial change from the status quo. "Weird" and "change from the status quo" are difficult handicaps in the political sphere. You need to be able to articulate your most important arguments and ideas in short, powerful statements. How Robin Hanson advocates futarchy might be a model for you. I myself intend to advance some arguments that, while quite uncontroversial as derivations from economic theory, are nevertheless disapproved of within the profession, like how a mathematician starts to fidget when a physicist treats dy and dx like two different variables, only if the physicist were completely right and the mathematician knew it.... It is not easy, and it can be frustrating.

You must be prepared to do the bulk of the work in this conversation, even when you have already done the work. That means a post full of links to your other posts is insufficient even if your other posts are sufficient. And they are not. Your FAQ, for example, is woefully incomplete. It does not even explain what your idea is.

You need to engage substantively with the weakest points of your argument and the public choice literature. There is a great deal of work for you to do to fully understand this position. For example, do taxpayers vote on how the total tax fund is allocated? Or do they each choose where to send the taxes they personally pay? If the former, your core argument, that taxpayer-allocated taxes will yield improvements because the allocations will reflect the opportunity cost of the taxpayer choices, is wrong. (It is wrong or at least very incomplete in the latter case as well, but I "see what you mean" and have no desire to quibble.) If the latter, you need to explain how this choice happens. Does a form come with the income tax form allowing you to circle "military," "environment," "welfare," and so on, indicating where your money should be sent? If you choose "military," does Congress then spend the money as it pleases so long as it claims the spending is military-related, or can one then choose between "tank," "gun," "therapy," and so on? How would this work for a sales tax? What if you want the money to be spent on an option Congress doesn't offer? And so on. These are the sorts of things that should be in your FAQ.

Does this lead to better policy because it makes lobbying pointless? Or do lobbyists turn from Congress to voters, manipulating them with propaganda, advertisements, and misleading rhetoric? Do we have less war, because the voters would never choose to impose such a conflict on themselves, or do we have more war, because ignorant, uneducated voters are more subject to jingoism and outgroup-hatred than the educated members of Congress? And so on.

Will policy be worse because taxpayers are substantially ignorant about what Congress does? (Imagine their surprise when they try to lower foreign aid and end up increasing it tenfold!) Or will policy be better because Congress won't be able to do anything taxpayers aren't aware of? Or will it be the same because taxpayers will basically vote for the status quo? And so on.

If taxpayers don't vote, what does this imply for your scheme?

Is your scheme always a good idea under any conditions? Would a dictatorship benefit from this kind of system? (The taxpayers can't kick the leaders out, but they can "suggest" where money should be spent.) When is your scheme a bad idea? And so on. Try to beat your own argument.

See what people like Robin Hanson and Scott Sumner do to advance their ideas, which are a bit odd and yet substantially grounded in familiar economics, and try to sound more like them. See what they do to make their ideas strong, and try to gain that kind of strength. And so on.

Good luck. You are not obviously wrong, but you are running a marathon uphill while underwater. It is going to take a very special approach and lots of practice. Be patient, improve yourself. Expand on that FAQ so that people have some idea of what you're talking about.

Some issues:

• Makes planning extremely difficult. It's hard for leaders to make consistent policy when they don't know how much money will go to which project.

• Subject to wild fluctuations. An event like 9/11 could strongly skew spending and leave other programs underfunded. In practice that means employees get laid off, infrastructure doesn't get maintained, etc. Damage of this sort is more expensive to repair than it was to maintain.

• Requires a lot out of the voters. I doubt very many people are interested in going over the federal budget and deciding how much money they would want to pay for each item.

• It's very easy to take a little bit of money out of your national debt payment contribution and apply it to a pet cause. This relies on other people picking up the slack. It wouldn't be long before S&P gave your bonds junk status.

• Bureaucratic nightmare. How are people to communicate their preferences? Write-in budget outlines? Voting booths? It's a lot of paperwork and someone's going to have to process it. Electronic systems have the usual vulnerabilities.

So we'd have one "voter" funding single-payer healthcare and a bridge 2 miles up the river while another voter funded health-insurance subsidies for low-income and a bridge 1 mile down the river.

You would have "single issue funders," someone who thought we weren't spending enough on the environment would go 100% into environment.

You can't find an aggregate advantage by simply summing up across the votes of people. Coming up with an even vaguely coherent plan or set of plans takes a lot of work. Without a process to do this and people to work on this, you will wind up with something even worse than a horse designed by a committee.

There must be some general term for the kind of fallacy behind pramatarianist thinking. Other examples are: 1) students should design their own curriculum to get a degree, 2) automobiles and smartphones should be designed by a focus group, actually even worse, by a focus group consisting of the entire population, 3) everybody working on a movie should vote on how the budget of that movie should be allocated between different scenes in order to produce a movie that EVERYONE will like.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with choosing your own curriculum, but you should not be able to get a degree labeled "physics BS" or "Math PhD" based on a curriculum you choose yourself.

If you think having everybody vote on what the parts of a car should look like will get you a better car, then it is reasonable to think pragmatarianism will get you a better budget. But, unfortunately, vice versa.

This seems pretty confused RE the purpose of taxes. There's no possible way for this to be any more than a PR stunt - tax authorities are imposing taxes, and hold dearly the right to allocate the proceeds.

I think anytime you see a movement that puts in their FAQ "taxpayers would boycott congress if they weren't happy with the tax rate", you probably have to just give up on the group and move on to someone with a more detailed model of public choice.

A bit of a nitpick (which could explain some of the reception you're getting here): I don't think the term "Pragmatarianism" is a good description for your proposal, it's just an unrelated name that sounds good. Might as well say 'I'm calling this proposal "Sensible Tax Policy"' or 'My idea, called "Reasonablism", is that...', etc.

A more modest and descriptive name would probably be better received, especially in places who dislike marketing.

One obvious failure mode is things that the voters don't realize are important not getting enough money. Imagine if when people donated to charity they could choose how much went to overhead. Do you think they'd get enough overhead money to run efficiently?

There would also be problems with inconsistent budgets and all the different branches of government spending large amounts of money on advertising.

Not a magical solution to all the world's problems, but likely a useful idea as a charitable donations tax credit which aggregates to some small percentage of the budget. A donation voucher of fixed amount.

The question is, how much tax choice.

Being able to allocate 1% of your taxes to the charity you choose, makes sense. It is actually in effect in some countries.

Being able to allocate 100% of your taxes as you like would be an unmanageable mess because people on average have no idea what is needed to keep a country or an economy running.

Somewhere in-between? Where? Without exact definitions what you mean by "tax choice" every discussion would be completely pointless.