The government needs better PR frankly, instead of allowing itself to be a punching bag all day. Nobody can even imagine how many things the government and your tax dollars provide.
http://democracyjournal.org/arguments/keep-it-simple-and-tak...
It's an interesting thought. There are plenty of reasons it's not going to happen in a vacuum - if Pelosi did it tomorrow she'd be mauled by both parties. But as part of something larger? It could be incredible. William Proxmire made his career with the Golden Fleece Award, attacking stupid and wasteful spending (sometimes quite inaccurately). I don't know why there's so little effort on the left to clearly, emotionally show the good that gets done.
Imagine if every budget fight involved someone coming forward and saying "I grew up being fed on WIC. I'm a civil engineer now, and WIC helped make that possible. Out of every tax dollar you paid, I got .000002 cents. Do you really want to take that away?"
(I hope I got that math right.)
I thank my lucky stars for those things and am very glad the government did it.
Of course, given the amount I pay in taxes, the government made an absolutely terrific investment. I have returned that value to it many, many times over.
All else being equal, of course I would prefer to pay lower taxes. That's what efficiency means, and the government is not very efficient.
But "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), and I kinda like civilized society.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/275/87/case.html
Maybe if they provided some kind of itemized receipt? "You paid $x in taxes. This was distributed as $y to infrastructure, $z to education, $w to defense" etc.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
Even if you just look at discretionary spending, debt payments are not a large portion of spending.
New borrowing is also larger than the interest payments.
Simple calculation:
With $20T of debt, at 3% interest rate (30Y bond), the interest on the debt is adding 600 billion dollars to the deficit per year (and it compounds).
600 billion with respect to the 3.8 billion federal budget is almost 16%.
And the interest rate is so low only because debt rates have been artificially suppressed by central banks using financial tricks such QE, the Fed buying its own's governments' debt, etc.
With interest rates bound to rise sooner or later, we are sitting on a financial time bomb.
So we save $30 billion by using the slightly smaller debt and $120 billion by using the interest rate of 2.4%.
$450 billion is still a huge budget item and it is a problem that interest rates will rise.
But you don't pay for the national debt, mostly. Recent payments on the national debt are around $420 billion - about 11% of the federal budget. God knows that's not small, but it's far from 'mostly', and 2/3 of the debt is even held inside the US.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29898083
The story contains an image of what they provide, as well as some suggestions for making it better.
Progressives in particular are sensitive to the idea of the government messaging them and tend to worry about the perception. Meanwhile, private interests have no compunction against advertising heavily and constantly to get their message across. It's a huge advantage for industrial incumbents over the government.