Participatory budgeting

by emptypockets

It's hard to believe that Bush's proposed budget is what anyone wants. For example, he suggests cutting half the federal funds for public broadcasting, while he spends the same amount ($200 million) in Iraq every 12 hours.

Unfortunately, as ordinary taxpayers, we don't have that much influence over the final budget. If we want to see more money put into biomedical research or the arts we can vote every couple years, we can try to lobby Congress, or we can give to charitable groups and bypass the government entirely. Maybe there ought to be a more direct method.

Suppose we try something new. Take the budget -- Bush's proposal is over $3 trillion -- and make a 0.1% across-the-board cut, reducing every agency's funding by one penny out of every 10 dollars. Take the resulting $3 billion and put it into a Taxpayer-Directed Spending fund. And let the people decide where that money should go.

You could simply have a box you check off on your tax form, where you indicate which departments you want to receive your ~$10 share of that funding. Or, we could adapt the federal matching funds model and have a website where anyone can contribute small-dollar (or large-dollar) tax-deductible donations to an agency, and the government would match those contributions dollar for dollar out of the Taxpayer-Directed Spending fund.

The central idea is to give taxpayers a direct voice in how their dime is spent. The amount should be small, so as not to bollix up the entire budget on public whims, but large enough to make a difference. $3 billion is 1/1000th of the budget, but it's 8x what public broadcasting gets, it's 20x what the National Endowment for the Arts gets, and it's enough to increase the NIH by a hefty 10% rather than effectively cut it with sub-inflation increases, as is the current plan.

There is some precedent for this kind of direct, taxpayer-driven spending. The federal campaign matching funds operate on a similar principle, for example, using voter-driven fundraising to direct public dollars. Apparently, following the 2004 tsunami, the Canadian government sent matching funds in disaster relief for whatever its citizens raised (helpfully blogged about at this site). As that writer points out, the US government already provides a kind of 30% matching fund for charitable contributions each year by making them tax-deductible.

The motivation for this project would not only be to redirect 0.1% of the budget (although that's a start), but to use Taxpayer-Directed Spending as an indicator of where people want their money spent, kind of a national petition, that would help organizations more effectively lobby for funding. It would be the writing on the wall to tell Congress what taxpayers want.

(On that note, see also my post a year ago with a proposal for "YouBudget", which I still think is a good idea.)

Sara recently wrote about how government can still do good and do it well, from health care to education (or, in her words, from polio vaccines to the GI Bill). She also wrote about how the power of these programs lies partly in the long-lasting infrastructure they create. Those great projects were conceived at a time when Americans had been exposed to undergoing personal calamity and willingly making personal sacrifices, during the Depression and again during WWII, and doing it together as a nation. Compare that experience with today's, when as Bush said, the biggest sacrifice most Americans make for the war is to "sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible image of violence on TV every night."

Today, I don't feel like the public has a sense of being part of public works or public spending. It's not our government anymore. I'm not sure great public deeds can be undertaken successfully again until it is. The basic methods for people-powered politics, especially using the internet as an organizing tool, have been developed over the campaigns of 2004, 2006 and now 2008. I think that by applying these tools to policy-making -- something as simple as divvying up the budget -- we can begin to return to Americans the sense of ownership of our nation that made great national projects possible.

Comments

[emptypockets]

I hate to explicitly solicit buzz, but I think this idea is worth discussion in the wider blogosphere. This site has a wonderful, thoughtful, highly-informed, but rather small readership. If you think it's worthwhile, let me just ask you straight out to take a minute this weekend and discuss this idea on your own blog or in relevant comment threads on other blogs you read. Like most sparks of an idea, I doubt it will come to much, but if it is not passed around a bit it will most surely go out.

Sorry, did that sound like a pot reference?

[P J Evans]

I'll buy that proposal.

(In fact, I remember a short story, science fiction, in the mid-eighties, where that was done: you could direct your tax dollars, or part of them, to a specific program or goal. And one year, _everyone_ put down 'Peace' as a recipient, after they'd made all the others they wanted.)

[Hal]

You might have public television but I can never find one on my cable. I do have a station that claims to be "public" but is no where near it. If you like constant fund raising for hours on end, if you like Leave it to Beaver, if you see that PBS has a great show try and find it, that's public television.

Its radio station has obtained translater after translater which blocks other FM station that have great programing, like Amy Goodman.

The head of the station is a ex disc jockey at a salary of $200,000 per year and isn't worth a dollar of it.

That's public TV here in Pennsylvania. One last thing he just built a brand new auditorium. I still wondering what for.

Public TV in the USA has been and still is a giant joke, most carry more advs or what ever they call them between programs than the commerical stations.

[bmaz]

Do you have any objection to me reprinting it in full, with full and proper accreditation and linkage of course?

[emptypockets]

bmaz, I'd love that - thanks!

(in fact I wouldn't even mind if folks plagiarized it in full and took credit for it themselves -- I'd just like to see the idea circulating!)

[Burgette Mobley]

Sounds good in principle, and I have no objection to cutting across the board...but. I think I may remember another "cut across the board", maybe by Pres. Reagan. The result was public facilities such as libraries, in an angry fit of hubris, simply shut down on Saturdays. Yes, they could have cut a hour a day and remained open on Saturdays but they didn't. They did the most provocative and anger-producing thing, guaranteeing an angry public response among the library using public. The result was predictable. Your idea of a seperate fund, to be used as the public decides, seems to me also guaranteed to incite devisivness.

[PrahaPartizan]

Even if we don't authorize the appropriation of funds, perhaps we might want to include the topic on all tax returns. Given the size of the study, we're almost guaranteed to get valid data in which direction the electorate would like additional expenditures to be made.

[joshlerner]

There's actually a lot of precedent for this - participatory budgeting is an internationally recognized best practice of governance. It's a budgeting process that was developed in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre and has since been adopted by over a thousand city governments (and some county and state governments and other public agencies).

See http://www.ParticipatoryBudgeting.org for info

Or you can read a recent post on participatory budgeting in the US, which I wrote for The Movement Vision Lab:
http://www.movementvisionlab.org/blog/participatory-democracy

[Jukesgrrl]

Love this idea. But I'd like to add, let's turn the participatory part into a live TV show a la American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. I'm totally serious. Spokespersons with various perspectives could advocate and people could call in or vote on line. "It's Your Money, America!" Ratings would be high and couch potatoes might take some interest in their government for a change.

[Dismayed]

Seems like a great idea to me. I'm just wondering how you'd keep from corrupting the process of deciding what the choices would be. You've got to figure there would be all sorts of string pulling, deception, ect. Perhaps putting it on the tube isn't such a bad idea.

[Palli]

My father used to say the federal income tax forms should have a blank circle on them so every taxpayer could make their own pie chart for how they would want the nation's wealth spent. What a plebiscite that would be!

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