Pejman unearths a link to an interesting proposed change to tax law. I too think this is a clever idea, and have argued for it in the past, but I doubt many people would take advantage of the opportunity to pay more tax “just because they could.”
If you really wanted to have fun with this idea, you could modify it so that paying an extra 1% in tax entitled you to direct 10% of the total to specific programs. An extra 2% lets you control the disposition of 20% of the total. And so on. (Perhaps cap it so that you can only pay a max of 5% extra, so the government retains a source of cash that can be used to fund currently-unpopular but necessary programs. This isn’t a direct democracy we’re living under, after all.)
Such a tweak might actually lead people to make use of it. I suspect there are a bunch of lefties who would be willing to pay more tax if it allowed them to partially defund the military. I might do the same if it allowed me to push my tax dollars towards the military and away from, say, pointless welfare-state boondoggles or counterproductive foreign aid. And the motivation of the government to implement such a system is obvious: more tax revenue in a way that people would actually be happy to pay!
