Some countries in EU have 2% of income tax support, i.e. If you are a tax payer in Lithuania and would like to support the development of non-profit/school/academy or sport club, you can do so by transferring 2% of your income tax to the administrating enterprise. And you can change/donate it every year.

While that is very good, at the same time 2% is pretty much nothing. Why not make it so that 50% is payers choice? (I wouldn't make it 100% only because there are too many people who wouldn't want to fund the military).

Why does the military need a special exception compared to the orphanage down the road?

According to a slapdash google search, the 2015 federal income due to taxes is $3.9 trillion, and about half of that comes from income tax. 2% of that is $20 million dollars.

I want to say that that's not nothing, but the Rosetta equipment alone cost €220 million. I'm not even sure how much of an impact $20m would have if you spread it across, e.g., the New York public school system.

($3.9T / 2) * 2% = $39 billion

I hope you don't work in a math related field.

Ugh, well, that was probably my most embarrassing comment. That's what I get for trying to math right before going to sleep.

The problem with this approach is the areas of need rarely aligns with areas of desire. What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about?

> What happens to those areas that need resources that nobody really cares about?

This is why taxes cannot be donations. Indeed, they are not donations.

I remember the people at institutional giving at my old college say that nobody wants their name on a parking lot.

I'd much rather have my name on a parking lot than on a landmine.

America has pledged not to use anti-personnel landmines(APL) anywhere outside of the Korean peninsula. I suspect (although obviously can't confirm) America has reserved this right but probably does not exercise it.

> The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, which includes not only clearance of landmines, but also medical rehabilitation and vocational training for those injured by landmines and other explosive remnants of war. Since the United States Humanitarian Mine Action Program was established in 1993, the United States has provided over $2.3 billion in aid in over 90 countries for conventional weapons destruction programs.[0]

While I am quite cynical and definitively against a lot of the ways our military has been employed, the degree of safety and the diplomatic security I receive as a result of it, provides more utility to me than a parking lot.

More broadly, roads and localized infrastructure are quite important, as is the military. I agree that personally I would allocate more money for infrastructure than to the military, and agree if this is the point you were making. I do want to illustrate the counterpoints that many people (once again, not me personally) would "Rather have their names on the bombs that kill terrorists"[1], than on a highway.

[0] http://www.state.gov/t/pm/wra/c11735.htm

[1] This is a dramatic characterization and hyperbole. However, I do suspect a large swathe of the country believes this.

I don't live in America. And my country makes all kinds of crap. Clusterbombs and what not. The landmine was meant as an illustration, not as a particular item, it could just as well have been a clusterbomb or some other intrinsically negative item.

Sorry, that was a pretty ethnocentric assumption on my part. A case could be made that landmines are intrinsically negative as they are non-discriminating hazards that render large portions of land unsafe well after a conflict has ended. Bombs, missiles tanks etc, I am not so sure of. I would appraise them as neutral, with the potential to be negative or positive.

Of course - if governments could raise funds by donations they would not tax. I hate taxes, but I hate the absence of taxes more :)

Are you saying that if there are more effective ways of raising money, governments necessarily know about them? I'm on your side with regards to taxing, but governments are slow-moving beasts that are often controlled by ideological moves rather than practical ones.

Indeed, they already do it right now:

http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html

They obviously don't take in anything more than a trivial amount of money. If you think that people would donate an equivalent amount of money if their taxes were eliminated - then you must have an awful lot of faith in people's inherent generosity in the face of their own self-interest. The economically optimal decision for any one person is to not give, but in the aggregate that means we don't have funding for infrastructure, research, etc.

I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong, but that the reasoning is, if it assumes that a government knows the most efficient way to do something.

Governments have tried plenty of ways of raising money other than tax (inflation is the classic one), but I don't think we have found a better way. While governments are not nimble, they have had a long history of testing alternative ways of paying for the things other than taxes and so far all have proved worse in the long term.

The one exception to all of this is war where people will effectively donate by buying things like war bonds or agreeing to charge non-market rates for goods, but as a solution for taxation war is hardly ideal. As I said I hate taxes, but I hate no taxes more.

Governments are well-known to use every trick in the book to get more money.

It is not a donation, because you don't get chose not to pay. You get to choose where to send the money. I don't see how this couldn't work with a high portion of the money.

Because we should budget for the cost of actual programs, and not have to guess based on how much various constituencies might allocate their tax dollars.

I wouldn't mind if gasoline tax went only towards road maintenance.

We should move carefully though because I am sure hard earmarking can be disastrous if taken all the way.

If nobody cares about a given area, why is it being maintained?

It's hard to imagine any system where areas that nobody cares for get funded.

"Congratulations, Herr Schmidt, your 2014 taxes have just been spent on a chandelier for the rebuilt Berlin city palace!"

"Congratulations Ms Smith, your 2013 taxes have provided 0.01% of the cost of a missile that was just deployed in Afghanistan!"

If we could choose how our taxes were used (a libertarian dream of mine for awhile), we'd have really lumpy funding. Hopefully it'd cause our military to be defunded, but the VA would probably end up taking the brunt of the hit.

Along those lines, I bet the funding of NASA would be even lumpier than it usually is. Don't they have difficulty planning engineering efforts because they're not sure if congress is going to continue funding next year?

Here's a thought: why don't NASA and other gov research institutes have an endowment instead? The government can add in a one-time lump sum and then periodically add the typical budget to the endowment? I imagine this would be pretty hairy though. It could be just another fund to get ransacked by congress on a rainy day, and there'd easily be controversy about how the fund was invested.

That would be passive-aggressive abuse. Unemployment is rarely a choice, yet society likes to make the unemployed feel that way. This would add insult to injury.

Don't you think it could be phrased as a warm community support message?

It's not about the how but the why. Social welfare is a matter of decency, not a luxury. What good does it do to couple that with a sense of sponsorship other than to elicit a feeling of guilt? This is just sociopathic Ayn Randian bullshit, not beneficial to anyone at all.