Want to pay more taxes? Go for it!

One of the most common rebuttals to dinner-table arguments for tax increases goes something like this: "You want to pay more taxes? Go for it! But leave me the heck alone!"

It turns out you actually can do that. Last year, the U.S. Treasury collected $2.6 million in voluntary reduce the debt donations. According to Wikipedia, the IRS collected about $1,236,259,000,000. I won't bore you by expressing that as a percent but suffice to say that just about no one feels strongly enough about the national debt to make their own contributions to it.

Enter California Republican Congressman John Campbell who has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives called "The Put Your Money Where Wealth is Act." The bill would place a little box on the 1040 that you can just write in the additional amount you wish to donate to the Treasury, making it easier for the millions of Americans who are secretly dying to pay more taxes to do just that.

The Wall Street Journalopines (subscription required) that"Apparently even most liberals would rather keep their money, or bequeath their estates to charity rather than to the IRS."

And why is that? I would guess that most people intuitively recognize that private organizations are more efficient at using resources to do good work than that government.

That's something to think about as we listen to politicians in an election talk magnanimously about the need to help out struggling homeowners -- with your money, whether you like it or not.