Pass the Buck: A Cure for the Federal Budget Blues

What follows is a vision of how Washington may someday handle the federal budget:

      It is April 15, 2020, a new federal holiday known as "Budget Day." In Grand Maw, Wisconsin, one Warren D. Peoria, having enjoyed an extra-long night's sleep and breakfasted to surfeit, retires to the den to prepare his income taxes. He settles in front of his 1.105 petaflop Apple iSheet XVI ("It's as easy as Apple pi!" said the ad), and there prepares to join in the greatest exercise in participatory democracy the world has ever seen.

     After plugging in the Form 1040 program, Peoria proceeds to punch, fiddle, fuss, shuffle, hedge, stretch, guess, and finagle his way through the exemptions, deductions, extensions, and pretensions, line by line and lie by lie, just as he has always done on April 15. Twenty seconds after he's finished, the computer blinks out a figure: $22,750. This is his tax bill.

     So far, so good, thinks Peoria. So far, no different from the year before this or the year before that. But this year is different. This year there's one more step:

    Peoria punches in a new program labeled "Pers-String Budget, Mr. Warren D. and Mrs. Mauve M. Peoria, SSN 927-306-0001 . . . etc." Warren Peoria is about to tell the United States Government how to spend his money.

     Consulting a handwritten sheet prepared after discussions with Mauve, Mr. Peoria punches in the following:  

NATIONAL DEFENSE .....................................$3,000

Unmanned drones, military............................. $300

(Peoria has a special fondness for drones)

POTHOLE REPAIR, U.S. HIGHWAYS, 
WISCONSIN..................................................$1,200

Road repair and Construction 
(U.S., general).................................................$250

FOREIGN AID, GENERAL...............................$1,200

Aid to Italy .....................................................$500

(Peoria's late father, Wingo, was a Sicilian immigrant)

Microsoft bailout ............................................$500

("As Microsoft goes. . . " thinks Peoria.)

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, 
GENERAL......................................................$2,400

(Cultural allocations are Mauve's department)

Grants to poets...............................................$250

Grants to sculptors.........................................$240

Grants to painters.......................................... $100

Grant to Ann Patchett (novelist).....................$500

("Ann who?" wonders Warren.)

Grants to baby-boom bloggers .......................$600

Aid to the sick, hungry, and unemployed.........$998.62

     And so on . . . until Peoria has accounted for all 22,750 of his little green orphans.

     That done, he connects to the federal Budget Day computer (housed in an erstwhile nuclear bunker in West Virginia), punches an icon on his iSheet, and, before the 9:00 p.m. CDT deadline, transmits his tax total and his Pers-String (for "Personalized, Strings Attached") budget to the federal government, which then must obey his wishes, to the dime.

      At 10:00 p.m. CDT, Peoria and Mauve repair to their holographic tv, which announces with a fanfare of synthesizers: "MSNBC FOX PRESENTS * * * * BUDGET DAY 2020 * * * * with Budget Day anchor Rachel Maddow in New York and her partner Bristol Palin in Los Angeles. . . ." By midnight, the numbers will be in. The United States will have its next budget. The people will have spoken. And not once will the politicians--happy, happy politicians!--have had to dirty their hands, not to mention their records, with the whole business.

     It is a system simple, irresistible, and inevitable.

     Sooner or later--who knows, maybe in 2012--the election year attrition rate among congressional incumbents will reach, say, 85%. That may be a good thing for the rest of us, but the pinstripe crowd in Washington will sulk. And while some congressmen may be shady, they're not dim: they know that

what does them in, year after year, is the budget. How they have writhed at the stake of fiscal responsibility, especially lately. True, the recent tax-cut and deficit-spending pyrotechnics on Capitol Hill have, like an auto-da-fe, been fun to watch, but the pols don't seem to enjoy them the way the rest of us do. Someday they're going to think of a way out, and the way out is simple: Pass the buck.

     Soon, thanks to the digital revolution, expediency will marry technology, and the Washington pols will say to Warren and Mauve Peoria, "Okay, you want to complain? Then you decide how you want your taxes spent." Warren and Mauve will leap at the chance. The politicians will heave a vast, bipartisan sigh of relief.

     It will work as described above. The amount the IRS demands will initially be determined by the last balanced budget (which occurred sometime before the Barbary Wars) plus a percentage based on inflation since then. And initially, the Peorias will not be allowed to spend their taxes on themselves, their family, or corporations in which they have an investment. Initially, kickbacks ("You put me in your taxes, and I'll give you most of it back") will be outlawed. Initially. But sooner or later, the impossibility of enforcing the new tax laws will become clear, as it has for the old. The legislators will finally say, "Whatever. Go ahead and give your taxes back to yourselves. We wash our hands of it." Most Americans will continue to pay taxes, if only to have someone protect their shores and fix their potholes.

     The consequences will be wonderful. The Pentagon will have to lobby directly to the people, launching huge ad campaigns, with an ageless Johnny Depp doing their tv pitches. (Madison Avenue will grow rich beyond its own most extravagant promises.) An obscure poet named Merriwether Edwards, from Southwest Virginia, will take out a full-page ad on the New York Times website with a sample of his work and a request that each taxpayer allot him $1 to fund his calling. He will get $1.43 million, far less than the woman from Chicago who, in a National Enquirer ad, promises to build a theme park called Oprah World. Poor people will starve one year, thrive the next, according to the whim of national largesse; they will now and then get restless. A congressman, once elected, will have a lifetime job, his campaigns freed from budget issues. Other federal employees will live with their bags packed. It will be more exciting than the stock market, with more pulling, polling, and puling than a presidential race.

     This is what Americans want. It is what they'll end up with. Best of all, it will be what they deserve.

[Ed's note: An amazingly prescient version of this vision first appeared in Memphis magazine in October, 1982.)