A Third Way report made the rounds yesterday touting the idea of providing taxpayers with a “receipt” when they pay their tax bills every year. They provide an example, which looks like this:
Put aside the technical details for the moment. I don’t know for sure if all their calculations are right. I don’t know why national defense is left off their sample receipt. Medicare and Social Security are funded from a different set of taxes than everything else and therefore have to be calculated differently. I don’t know how you’d divvy up the share of revenue from corporate income taxes, excise taxes, etc. For now, though, let’s assume we could work out all that stuff to everyone’s satisfaction.
My question is this: who would be in favor of this and who would be opposed? Would everyone’s receipt show the same items, or would everyone get, say, the same top five or six and then a random mix of other stuff? Who would decide how to break things out? Would liberals be afraid that people might look at the welfare-related spending and be outraged? Would conservatives be afraid that people might look at the startlingly low numbers for everything after the Big Five (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, interest on the debt) and lose some of their outrage over federal spending?
Technical details aside, this is the kind of idea that everyone should support. Taxpayers should know where their tax dollars are going, after all. And yet, I’ll bet that neither party would actually be in favor of this. Why do you suppose that is?