No, it’s not April Fool’s Day.  Here me out.

I have come to the realization that one of the things wrong with our country is that we have too few taxes.  Having one or two huge taxes like Social Security withholding and income tax means that, to the average taxpayer, it all goes to this amorphous blob called “The Government”.  What I want is for the government to chop these monolithic taxes into smaller bites so that the people know where their money is going.  I want a separate tax for every government activity.  I also want taxpayers to know, on a paycheck to paycheck basis, how much they’re kicking into the pot.

For example, your paystub should look something like this:

Of course, this is just an example.  An complete list of each and every tax that would be pulled from your paycheck would be a lot longer.  I would also want sections for the state and federal taxes, with the same detail.

Why would I want this?  I want this because when the average voter and taxpayer looks at her paystub and sees all the things our government is doing and how much that is costing them personally, I believe that when someone says “Why are we sending troops to Outer Jerkholistan?” or “Why are we paying for another Department of Education study to see if piping in the sound of sperm whales mating helps children learn to read?”, they’ll understand.  Saying “We’re going to take a couple hundred dollars out of your check for stuff.  Don’t bother asking what that stuff is.” gives politicians and bureaucrats a lot of cover to waste a lot of money.  If I’m seeing line items in my paycheck going up, I’ll want to know why.

Want a real shocker?  I believe we need higher taxes in our country.

Put away the pitchforks and hear me out on this one too.

Currently, when the government wants to do something, from building roads and schools to sending troops overseas, there is no fiscal restraint on that decision.  Someone at the Treasury Department adds a couple of zeroes to the federal debt, sells a few more bonds, and the money to do things magically appears.  I want to hamstring that ability.

I want the federal budget to be run without deficits.  I think a lot of us do.  We’ve gotten nowhere in the past half century or so when it comes to actually cutting spending.  We nibble around at the edges and use cuts as a way to either reward political allies or punish our foes, but nothing really gets done in the end.

I want that to stop.  I want the government to be honest with the American people about how much it costs to do our business.

When the President wants to send troops overseas on his latest pet foreign policy project, or spend billions of dollars on new fighters, bombers, submarines, tanks, rifles, or whatever, I want someone to stand up on the floor of the Congress and say “This is going to cost $500 billion a year.  This bill contains the tax to pay for that. Voting is now open.”.  The same goes when a Congresscritter wants a new bridge to nowhere built in their district or wants to expand welfare spending to include anyone making less than 10 times the poverty level.

When we stop masking government spending in meaningless deficit numbers and start forcing them to come to us directly and say “We want to do this, so you need to start paying up.”, people will take a good hard look at what they want, what they need, and what they’re willing to pay for.

My guess is that once we start forcing the American taxpayer to pay cash on the barrelhead for not only those things they like, but also those things they don’t like, then the number and size of those things will come under a lot more scrutiny, as will the politicians who keep piling things on the bill.  In the end, I think that forcing us to pay attention will force the government to become smaller, leaner, and less expensive.