leff@smu.UUCP (11/19/83)
#N:smu:16500001:000:3583 smu!leff Nov 17 11:33:00 1983 This is in response to the recent news article that I believe I saw here about whether it would be advisable to have the voters vote to earmark a certain amount of the budget to the things they want. The system would be that everybody would be allowed to earmark their percentage of the national government's income to whatever things they were or weren't interested in. Thus if the national income is 600 billion dollars and there are 100 million registered voters, each person would get to allocate 6000 dollars in any way they chose. The objections to such a scheme that were raised were special interest groups having more power and that one person felt they didn't have time to make decisions on these matters. Special interest groups would have less power under such a scheme because they couldn't lobby individuals for little money. They could mount advertising campaigns but so can congressmen. One of the powers of the special interest groups are people who feel very strongly on one particular issue. If a c congressman brings some pork barrel into a small region, the people there are very likely to vote for him. Other people who may not approve of that project might dislike him slightly. However they like enough of what he is doing in other areas so they vote for him anyway. Thus if a vast majority of the people dislike something slightly but a small manority want it badly our current system would encourage pork barrel or other appeals to vocal and strong feeling minorities. Now a minority can put their money somewhere but not all. Also such a system does not need to require that people should decide precisely how the money should be spent, only give their value judgement of how important military is versus education or welfare or tax collection or the space program or whatnot. The experts obviously can't agree whether spending more money on nuclear arms will a) encourage war by promoting an arms race b) discourage war by deterring the Soviets or whoever c) have no effect since we already have enough warheads. Therefore, I see no reason that the people would make a better or worse decision than our paid and elected representatives. In many cases, the basic decisions as to which departments we should fund are based on value judgements not expertise. Whether we should be spending government money to support a space program is a value judgement that can be made with much less knowledge than whether we should use side aperture radar or some other mechanism to map the surface of Venus. There would always be the option of earmarking some or all of your $6,000 to Congress to spend as it wished. I also believe that anyone who does not vote should have their portion put in the category to be earmarked by Congress. Thus there would be a substantial amount of money that Congress could use to handle situations not anticipated at the time of the earmarking "election" or misjudged by the people. I think the turnout for the earmarking "election" would be higher than under the current system but by no means 100 per cent of all eligible voters. Perhaps more important than the quality of the decisions made by the voters would be that there would be more feeling by the people that they could do something. First instead of casting a vote which probably won't be the deciding vote and therefore not make a difference they can at least affect their $6000. Secondly, important decisions would be made by the people and not by congresspeople who frequently are perceived as lying politicians, unreachable, etc. k