The will of the people

So the a stopgap budget resolution was passed on Wednesday (10/16/2113), just in time to avert a potentially worldwide economic crisis. This was just the latest example of how elected legislators ignore the will of voters.

The question becomes how to get a more responsive government? Government is powerful because, in aggregate, the monies it collects (primarily through taxes) is so large that it overshadows the resources of any other institution or organization. And because elected politicians control where these monies are spent, they are in positions of great power. One way to diminish their power is to decrease their control over the big pots of tax revenue.

The best place to start is with Social Security taxes. Currently, surplus social security payments are diverted into a two Social Security Trust Funds; funds which the U.S. Treasury uses to buy treasury bonds, thereby tacitly bulking up the monies collected by the federal government. Two points about this borrowing from the Social Security Trust… (1) it is used to argue that there is no trust (which is true in so far as the trust has no ‘money in the bank’) and (2) money (quietly) borrowed from the trust fund is used to minimize the apparent government debt.

But Social Security taxes are not intended to be a source of revenue for the government, they are supposed to be set aside to supplement the retirement of older Americans. As such, those who pay into the trust should decide who may borrow their monies and how it can be spent. There should be a way for tax payers to purchase government bonds directed to specific public projects (both local and national). Information about proposed public projects (including potential contracts, bids, budgets and goals) should be available for public perusal and critique for purposes of transparency. Taxpayers could ‘vote’ their support by committing their Social Security tax payments to government bond(s) to fund Program X and build Public Works Y. Elected politicians would be responsible for budgeting normal tax revenues to repay these bonds into the Social Security Trust as needed and cover programs they deem essential.

Ideally, this would expand over time so that taxpayers control the spending of a majority of tax revenues (60-80%) and politicians would be elected based on their bureaucratic skills and not photogenic spinmeistering.