I have an easy solution. Let's make your federal income taxes look less like a bill and more like an order form. So for example some portion of your income taxes are pre-allocated for essential services (say 50%) and everything else is your choice. You get 50 points to spend and a variety of categories to choose from: education, defense, infrastructure, green energy, science research, enhanced Medicare services, NASA, deficit reduction, etc. This data is delivered to congress who must use it as a framework for 50% of the federal budget. After you filed your taxes mid-year you'd receive a detailed receipt that let you know exactly what Americans have decided to spend our money on.
That's part of democracy isn't it? We might be better off if we only let highly educated people vote and only after they passed a series of intelligence and psychological tests but we don't do that. As long as essential spending was covered I do think it would lead to a better allocation of federal dollars simply because it would add an additional check & balance to the system.
You could now (effectively) vote for a candidate or party and through your allocation of tax dollars keep them on a leash. It would allow for a more nuanced political system. For example I might vote for a deficit reducing Republican but I don't trust them to keep their hands off the EPA so I give environmental protection 50 points. Maybe I vote for a Democrat but I still think the deficit is really important so I put 50 points on deficit reduction. This would add a whole new dimension to politics and give some power back to the people. It would in my opinion make the commons relevant again. As it stands today I think many Americans are feeling like their vote is no longer all that important. You get two choices, you vote for one or the other, pat them on the back and cross your fingers. That's just not good enough. By controlling a few hundred billion dollars of the budget we might find ourselves on equal footing with PACS, lobbyists, media tycoons, etc.
Of course there are a lot of practical details I didn't address. It may be this could only cover domestic discretionary spending, or perhaps you could only allocate your tax points every 2 or 4 years to provide for more stability and of course for long-term deficit reduction it would have questionable value since the overall level of spending/revenue would still be playing a central role.
That is not an inherent part of democracy, at least not as it's practiced in any sane nation on the scale we're talking here. And we do put people through rigorous testing before they are allowed to vote on laws and budget issues — it's called an election. You might argue the test is flawed (I would agree), but it's not exactly open season. Opposition to direct democracy was one of the founding principles of the United States — at the time, it was generally accepted that the history of direct democracies had shown it to be an utter failure in actually making people free or happy. That's why we have a representative democracy.
Now, if we could vote on Congressional salaries, that might be interesting.
That sounds like a great experiment to try in another country. I like the way our government is currently structured, it was no accident that the founders made the Senate and the Presidency the way they did (hint, not the way it is today). We don't live in a pure democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The fact that the Senate and the President are a bit more immune from public opinion than the House (and they are far less so today than they were in the founders' time) is a feature not a bug.
I'm not sure if the tragedy of the commons would apply in this case. The "mandatory" aspect of elevating discretionary spending into social spending via taxation seems to fundamentally alter the psychology of spending. "Well, if I absolutely must spend this money on other people, then I guess I'll spend it on ___" (education comes to mind as one area people in America might universally agree should get more dollars). The weakness in this system would be the lack of expertise within the "common wisdom" of the people. That might be solved by, say, providing a "template spending ballot" from respected people... a sort of proxy delegation but simplified so you just copy down the numbers they say. If that latter option were made simple enough that 90% of people could understand and do it, the expertise of a few would hold larger sway than the somewhat uninformed choices of the many.
BTW, a friend and I also thought of this idea independently; we called it "mandatory taxes, voluntary distribution" [1]
In 2000, voters thought they picked "humble foreign policy", "deregulation" and "lower spending" in the primary. It turns out they voted for the exact opposite.
About 2 years ago, voters thought they picked "not forcing people to buy insurance they can't afford". They also voted for the exact opposite.
Many, many people use tax-deductable donations to do just this. Soo...this is already done. To make it done more, there should be non-profits. Non-profit insurance organizations, non-profit post, mail, private schools. Seriously, just encourage more people to donate, rather than be taxed. Of course, this won't solve the government's problem, because the government is intentionally expansionary.
