Don't pay taxes this year - Designate them!

"What if we designated where we want the government to use our tax dollars?"

 
(A version of this article appeared on Gather last summer. It seemed timely to ressurect it)

I have a suggestion, which I call "designated taxes," a way to make writing that tax check a little less painful.

I'm against giving the government a blank check. Let me rephrase that. I'd love to give the government a blank unsigned check. What I'm against is letting the government decide where to spend my check.

What if we designated where we want the government to use our tax dollars? You can do this with broad-based charities like the United Way. They let you say, "I'd like 50% of this to go to cancer research, 25% to muscular dystrophy, and 25% to out-of-work Mongolian monkey men."

Wouldn't it make filling out a 1040 form more pleasant, if you could add:

* Use $12,500 of my hard-earned money to provide for national defense

* Give $10,200 to health, education, and welfare

* Allocate $3,078 to programs for the disabled

* Drop $1,043 on transportation infrastructure

* Spend $328.40 in the %##!!& pothole in front of my house.

* Donate $.67 towards the President's salary

* And put the remaining $4,300 towards national health care. If we don't have national health care by the time you receive my check, I'd like that money back.

The first tax in history was levied by a Roman emperor, Caesar Greedius III, who got the measure passed by claiming it was to fix a cracked sidewalk in front of the coliseum. The crack is still there. That won't happen under my proposed system.

The beauty of designated taxes is, unlike every other process in our democracy, you and I don't have to agree on anything. If you want to spend $11,000 on transvestite rehabilitation programs, hey, your taxes, your choice. We all write in what we want, the results are totaled, and bada bada bing, we have our new federal budget.

The concept of not having to agree has other benefits. For one, we wouldn't have to pay for 500 plus people in Congress. Senators and representatives spend 96% of their time arguing over where to spend our money. The remaining time is divided equally between bashing the opposition (except in election years when that's all they do), and interviewing attractive interns.

A typical congressional conversation goes like this:

BIG STATE SENATOR: Harry, I need your support on this bill to build a good-for-everyone gizmo in my state.

LITTLE STATE CONGRESSMAN: You know me, Joe; I'm 100% behind gizmoism. By the way, how are you leaning on our giant abattoir?

BIG STATE SENATOR: It has to go in someone's backyard.

If you feel you must give me credit for this idea you can tell the IRS it came from a friend whose name you've forgotten, but whose phone number you remember: 1-800-BITEME.

HERE'S WHAT YOU DO: Send in your tax form this year with a note designating where your taxes are to go and tell the IRS, if they'll send you the appropriate addresses, you'll get those checks in the mail, pronto.

Hopefully, designated taxes will catch on with the voters before your case hits the tax courts.

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MORE MUSING ON TAXES:

No noun has so many verbs connected to it as the word "taxes", which we pay, hide, avoid, withhold, shelter, play game games with, run away from, and bitch about from the day we experience withholding's first bite.

While your income tax is the most visible face of the tax monster, there are also: taxes whose first names are death, inheritance, hidden, nuisance, excise, personal, poll, property, proportional, sales, stamp, severance, and value-added. There are sin taxes on tobacco, alcohol and gambling as well as local taxes for sewers and schools. Most taxes also come in state, county, city and federal flavors. Enough tax categories to make you wish you'd never learned to read - or count.

     Then there are taxes that are not called taxes, a.k.a. permits, licenses, assessments, bond repayments, yada, yada, and yada.

     Today, a citizen has to understand tax bases, tax-exemptions, tax selling, tax shelters, tax stamps, and tax shields. (A tax shelter is when you don't tell the government; a tax shield is when you tell them, but they can't do anything).

     MY TAKE IS: a tax by any other name is … a tax.

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