Poet, songwriter and activist Gil Scott-Heron
I’ve been thinking about taxes lately, and I suspect I’m not alone. While the current IRS scandal is pretty discouraging, I have been disgusted far longer by how the U.S. government spends so much on aggression and so little on compassion.
Is this really who we are, as a country? Investing more in nightmares than dreams?
The sequester and its piecemeal undoing continue to reveal Congress as out-of-touch. And since so few citizens make time to contact elected officials (or vote, for that matter), maybe there’s a better way to gather data about how we’d like to have money spent by the government on our behalf. Why not put a short and simple survey at the end of federal income tax forms?
The Congressional Budget Office already keeps track of allocations, although we may wish to choose better categories to represent our priorities. For example: Education, Health Care, Environmental Protection, Welfare, Transportation, Military, and so forth. There should also be an opportunity for open comment, to suggest what is most important to you. Federal tax filers would simply complete this optional survey by allocating percentages for each category. Such data collected by the IRS could then be aggregated and published for comparison with actual federal expenditures annually. Though it is doubtful that Congress’s budget will reflect citizens’ sentiments, at least we’d have a frame of reference.
What do you think?
Personally, I like Gil Scott-Heron’s take on the big picture, and this video accompanying his poem: “Work for Peace.”
