Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!mart
From: mart@csri.toronto.edu (Mart Molle)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: Controllable Expenditures
Message-ID: <1989Aug18.095648.6824@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: 18 Aug 89 13:56:48 GMT
References: <3984@looking.on.ca> <1479@apss.apss.ab.ca> <28367@watmath.waterloo.edu> <1481@apss.apss.ab.ca> <3232@yunexus.UUCP> <645@UALTAVM.BITNET>
Distribution: can
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
Lines: 44

In article <645@UALTAVM.BITNET> Tim McLellan, TMCLELLA@UALTAVM.BITNET writes:
>Think of a city land owner's property taxes.  In cities where there are two
>school divisions (eg: Catholic, Protestant), you have a choice on your tax
>form as to where your school taxes should be sent.
> 
>Why couldn't we send in a form to Ottawa, telling them how to spend my
>tax contribution.  All the various agencies of the govt could send me junk
>mail describing their activities and why I should pick them as a receiver
>of some of my tax dollars.  We could choose as many or as few as we like,
>or it would go somewhere by default (general revenue?).
> 
>What a neat concept, to be able to say where your tax dollars are to
>be spent  8{) .  Let the govt spend _ITS_ money anyway it likes, but let
>the tax payer spend their money the way the like.

Sorry, your analogy between directing school taxes to Protestant vs. Catholic
school boards and being able to target your tax money towards a specific
cause/agency is not very good.  With school taxes, we are told ``You MUST
pay school taxes, but you can send it to bureacracy A or B'' [or at least
you get the choice if you can prove that you're Catholic...]  The analogous
situation would be for you to set up a competing unemployment insurance scheme,
and we are all given the choice of belonging to your scheme or Ottawa's.
Presumably, you'd try to run your scheme efficiently (or humanely, ruthlessly,
environmentally aware, or whatever basis you want to market your scheme under),
and send us all kinds of junk mail explaining why your scheme is better.  This
is very different from what you propose, where I could say that I just won the
lottery and will never need unemployment benefits so I won't contribute to
either of them.

BTW, I like your idea of introducing some "free market forces" into the Big
Government, but it occurred to me that what you desribe has been there all
along, in the form of registered charities.  You are free to give money to
any and all of them that YOU CHOSE TO SUPPORT.  If you donate Y dollars, then
you get a tax deduction, which reduces your tax bill by X dollars, right?
That X dollars would have been Ottawa's if you hadn't made the donation,
so in effect, you're really spending Y-X dollars and forcing Ottawa to make
a matching contribution of Y, right?  So, you *are* telling Ottawa how to
spend (some of) your tax money, but there are some overhead costs involved...

Mart L. Molle
Computer Systems Research Institute
University of Toronto
(416)978-4938
mart@csri.toronto.edu