WRITTEN ON September 23rd, 2004 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Across the Board, What do we want?
For hardcore pacifists having to pay for war and for preparations for war is morally indefensible. It’s perfectly rational to believe that peaceful conflict resolution may be the harder path, but that going to war is something we just have to get over, like slavery.
Its one of the strongest arguments for a degree of hypothecation in taxes.
Imagine the opposite – that supermarkets worked like elected government. We’d all elect a food supplier, then – say – have Tesco delivering bags on your doorstep for five years. Inevitably it would be the things other people liked – mushy white bread, plastic sausage tubes filled with mechanically extracted mush, fruit air freighted in from Kenya or misleadingly stamped as grown in Israel. They’d direct debit you arbitrary amounts. They might subject you to a means test, but wouldnt ever enquire if you were vegetarian or if broccoli gave you wind. After five years everyone would be so fed up they’d vote in, say, Sainsbury. We’d get five years of own brand baked beans, oven chips and Sunny Delight instead.
Ideal e-enabled government would make paying tax easier. It could also start to make it more expressive. The ideal Inland Revenue would send you a precompleted tax return, as they do already in Sweden and I think Denmark, with a polite letter.
It might say
“Dear taxpayer, Here, here from our highly confidential and well-protected database, is what we reckon you earned from salary, dividends, share sales, rent etc. We believe you’re entitled to the following allowances for being extra tall, helping probationers and having seven children. This pleasantly low sum is therefore what we believe you owe HM Treasury. If that’s all correct there’s no need to any further action, other than to indicate here how you would like to see the discretionary part of your taxes spent.”
You could then uncheck the spend on things that kill people, and select instead things like public transport, community policing, drug treatment centres, and renewable energy.
Two weeks later the Chancellor takes the management summary to the PM and shows the all too predictable trend.
There might follow a difficult phone call to the White House.
“George, remember we said we were with you all the way on Iraq? Well, the numbers just came in and the taxpayers just won’t buy it.” “Gee, that’s terrible. We were all ready to go. Did you give them the dossier?” “Yes, we had it emailed to everyone but it didnt work. Perhaps they thought it was spam.” “Did you have that fancy tattoo and air show and show them all the new weapons?” “Of course, but they voted to put them straight in the expanded Imperial War Museum.” “Weird.” “Yeah, sorry George.” Clunk.
Obviously we elect people to decide priorities for the nation,and to some extent they make difficult decision based on spooky information that can’t be generally shared. But it is morally objectionable to extort money from people for purposes that in all conscience they find intolerable.
What might be discretionary would be a legitimate area for vigorous public debate. But feedback in the form of diverted flows of money is a lot more expressive than opinion polls and endless chattering and the odd vote. And ideal e-enabled government could make that easy and fun to do.
6 Responses to “Tax with Nectar cards?”
The database of taxpayers is there. If it were connected details of every aspect of what we earn, as I think it is in Sweden and other countries, it would have to be extremely well protected (which begs the question).
Sil, I agree that something like this would be against a present trend (of ever more complex DIY goverment). That’s what we’re trying to do here – envision what it is we really want, regardless of the obstacles and the forces dragging us in the wrong directions.
William,
Thanks for the response. I didn’t quite appreciate the goal of the site, which is frankly an admirable one. That being the case, this level of automated calculation and application could apply to way more than simply your tax bill. Imagine if all benefits were equally handled this way; all the benefits to which you are entitled are automatically paid into your bank account, or into a Post Office account for those without bank accounts (since one must visit the Post Office to collect benefits anyway). It could even be set up such that only those benefits to which you are entitled and for which you have registered are paid, which neatly covers both the DIY trend and the automation ideal.
Stuart Langridge (I forget that I shouldn’t just sign my initials, sometimes)
I would certainly support using e-gov to let people opt out of paying for our military.
But we need to be careful that such a system doesn’t end up being a direct democracy through the back door. Because if most issues became optionals through this proposed tax system then effectively we’d be having lots of referenda.
Which opens up a big discussion on what role would representatives play in such a system, how would voters get properly educated on the issues and how could we avoid manipulation of the results?
On unofficial referenda: that depends on what me unticking “fund the military” on my tax return actually means. Does it mean:
1. Take the bit of my tax that’s used for discretionary purposes and use it on the stuff that I ticked, or
2. Here is my vote on what the government should spend tax money on.
If 2, then every tax return is a referendum. If 1, then it’s merely my choice; if then everyone votes against the military then we don’t have a military. This is not necessarily a good thing: as Jason says, this is “direct democracy” (which is entirely different from having lots of referenda), and it means that the government has no power to make people do things even though they don’t want to, like pay for a national health service.
Dead right – it opens all these issues.
For this brainstorm (given new focus on 4 Nov deadline) let’s focus on what the e-enablement in govt should offer, eg access to information, more interactive consultative processes, the possiblity of a degree of hypothecation in taxes.
Let’s also nail e-voting, ie state exactly what our requirement is if we’re to be happy with it.
And how we want to support and have access to our MPs. FaxyourMP and Theyworkforyou are very cool and well executed – are they part of an ideal end point or do we want more I wonder?
I don’t want to, you know, rubbish what sounds like a really good use of technology to make everyone’s lives a lot easier and more pleasant and so on, but I see the really serious problem in the proposal as centring around “from our highly confidential and well-protected database”. Whence came this database? How much extra scrutiny and form-filling would we have to subject ourselves to in order that it were produced? Perhaps this database already exists, in which case I can’t see why we’re not doing this now, because it’s a neat idea.
The cynic in me also says that there has been a shift from the government informing us to which allowances we are entitled to it being our responsibility to work it out for ourselves. I genuinely can’t see a reason for this other than that some people will not realise that they are entitled to an allowance and hence will not reduce their tax bill as much as they could, thus retiring a small bit of the national debt. This proposal would require a shift back to the government working it out for us and sending it for approval, which is against that trend.