My long distance provider, CREDO, has customers vote each year on which environmental and social organizations the company profits are donated to. We can vote by organization, by percent.
Wouldn't it be a great idea if we could do the same with our taxes? There could be an additional page at the end of our tax form, listing the various things our government spends money on, and each of us could assign our money by percentage.
I could see a list that includes: transportation, education, infrastructure, public safety, consumer protection, environmental protection, parks, forests and beaches, and war.
When faced with the choices, seeing things like the gulf oil spill, the Wall Street meltdown and our seemingly endless involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, where might each of us put our check marks?
I suspect that many of us, myself included, would opt for spending the money to make things better at home: create jobs, clean up our water supplies, fix our roads, educate our kids and keep up our national parks.
When forced to think about it, we see that there is only so much money and that something is going to get short changed. We'd have to vote our priorities.
Then, how many people would vote to send the lion's share of our national wealth to the middle east to try to, well, what exactly are we trying to do?
I'm guessing that the military's share would be much smaller.
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