The Greater Accountability Amendment

Imagine a federal government that operated solely on voluntary donations …

The government would be limited to performing only those services that had genuine support and were reasonably efficient, and who can argue with that?

If only the government could decide how to distribute our tax dollars, then most people would not donate much if the government were doing anything they didn’t like.

Would we pay more hoping that our favorite agency would get more? No. We would not fund 10 bad agencies and hope that some went to the agency we like. Therefore, the government would allow us to target donations to specific government agencies.

Would people would pay more to insure that their favorite project within an agency gets funded? No. They would not fund 10 bad projects and hope that a small percentage went to the project they like. Therefore, the government would allow us to target donations to specific government programs.

Clearly, genuinely effective projects for national defense, national parks, roads, disaster relief and other forms of charity would have plenty or money.

Programs would be competing and thus evolve. Only the best would get much money.

I conceived the Greater Accountability Amendment a few months after I first conceived the Accountability Amendment.

The Greater Accountability Amendment would result in better accountability than the Accountability Amendment because it would result in same ability of taxpayers to control the expenditure of each of their tax dollars, but in addition, it would eliminate all but the best services; whereas, the Accountability Amendment wouldn’t necessarily eliminate some ineffective services because it provides no ability to pay less taxes, and thus it could result in taxpayers choosing to fund those projects they dislike least – the lesser of all evils.

Only being able to choose the lesser of two evils in our two party monopoly is how we got in the current mess, so the Accountability Amendment may not provide as much accountability as one might expect. Therefore, we need the Greater Accountability Amendment or the Representation Amendment to make government substantially more accountable.

The text of the Greater Accountability amendment would be:

The right of each taxpaying entity within the United States to determine the total amount of taxes it shall pay to the United States government shall not be infringed.

The percentage of taxes requested by Congress that may be declined by taxpayers shall be implemented in 10% increments beginning one year after ratification of this article.

No taxpayer shall ever pay less than 90% of the amount paid by that taxpayer in the previous year.

The Congress may publish the percentage that each taxpayer declined to pay.

This article may be repealed by an 80% vote of the entire membership of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, thus creating a new Constitutional amendment whose sole content shall directly parallel the first sentence of the 21^st article of this Constitution. The votes in the Senate and the house of Representatives shall have occurred within 10 days of each other.

This article shall not apply to the states.