Common ground: citizen allocation

Here is a first draft attempt to flesh out Pope Benedict's suggestion of fiscal subsidiarity. If Obama and congressional Democrats truly want to find common ground on the issue of tax-funded abortion, try this: citizen allocation of certain government expenditures.

From the standpoint of well-formed moral principles, appropriations for Title X abortion services, funding for Planned Parenthood and U.N. population control programs and the like might be easier to accept if they were funded solely by individuals who freely chose to do so. Here's how such a plan might work:

All controversial value-laden budget items would be removed from congressional consideration. Congress would only have the authority to include such items in a citizen allocation check list. The 1040 tax form would now include a new table with each of these allocation items listed. The taxpayer could optionally allocate a portion of his taxes toward one or more of these programs without increasing his total tax liability. Each program on the list would receive tax money only in the amount allocated by individual taxpayers.

So, for example, Planned Parenthood would only receive tax money from citizens who proactively chose to allocate to them. The pro-life and neutral citizens who chose not to support PP or other abortion programs would therefore be able to pay taxes in good conscience, knowing that their money was not paying for the slaughter.

I suppose that pro-life programs could go on this list as well, with the expectation that only pro-life taxpayers would be allocating to them. The idea is: let each citizen follow the dictates of his own conscience with regard to all such value-laden allocations.

Note that this only works if there is no other government money going to these controversial programs. If Congress were still allowed to allocate monies from the general fund, such citizen allocation would merely be feel-good symbolic gestures, and the proposal would be useless.