On paying taxes - there are two levels; compulsory and voluntary.

In the compulsory area - when we pay our taxes we tick boxes saying where we want the monies spent - hospitals, police, education, services etc.

In the voluntary area we can tick boxes donating sums - i.e.

If individuals had the right to say where their tax went, chaos would ensue; the allocation of tax revenue must be a role for a democratically elected goverment. The 'd' word is critical - that is how we have our say.

Sadly the D word doesn't work.

I think that is a good idea in principle JK.

Perhaps each year 10 projects could be chosen for "Voluntary Contribution" part of our tax.

That would mean that 10 large projects could be chosen such as in 2008 :

1. 2012 Olympics
2. 2012 Para Olympics
3. Youth Club Provision (In Your Area ? )
4. Arts Project ( Theatre )
5. Arts Project ( Music )
6. Heritage Buildings Fund
7. Animal Welfare Fund
8. World Poverty Fund
9. Eco Grants for New Homes ( Solar Panels/Wind energy)
10. Other

1 % of Income Tax could be devoted to this and those want to choose can choose to put 10% of this 1% to any of the projects up to 80% or they could spread it out evenly. If someone showed no preference then it would be split evenly between all 10 projects.

To get on the list it could be voted on each year during 10 days of programmes where a short list for each category would have a public telephone vote - which would mean the best projects would be chosen each year - plus the money raised from the phone vote could also be used to run the scheme.

It would involve people more in their taxation and their day to day lives thus ENHANCING democracy by givig 1% of decision making directly over to the "people" who would then start to respect and perhaps donate ( if they were rich ) more to projects to improve life for us all.

I think JK as actually made a very good point - we need to be more involved in what is happening. At the moment we give power to a Political Party who then ignore what we really want - the system is broken and we need to find ways to make it truly democratic again.

We can do all sorts of amazing things with science yet our political system belongs to the 19th Century where power is still in the hands of a few.

Tax allocation voting has some merit - as described. But shouldn't we also vote on defence/military policy, NHS priorities, the legal system and immigration ? In fact, we do - every four years or so (and in between!).

A society run by instant voting would struggle because the media can shape and distort what is actually happening.

For instance although millions were opposed to the Iraq war when Tony Blair said they had weapons of mass destruction that would have meant a vote of the public would have seen a small majority vote in favour of invasion.....so the pitfalls are many.

I think that when it comes to the bigger picture we have to give our politicians a chance to run things - though perhaps the current system is too weighted towards a two party system where the two parties are almost indentical in policy. Though at the moment Cameron is seen as the "most competent" of the two leaders - Brown is just accident prone.

BR. I agree that our politicians should run things - who else ? But a WMD vote giving 'a small majority in favour of an invasion'; how could you know that ?!

mmm Jonathan that sounds a bit like tabloid taxes to me- everyone would donate to the find Maddie fund and no one to HIV charities.

not a good idea in my very humble opinion.

Ah David, my reason being that I think most people would be very unwilling to put their hard earned cash where their (tabloid) mouths are and that very little would be raised in the "voluntary" area but at least the media couldn't complain that there were too few prisons, for example, when their readers were not paying for them.

And the compulsory taxes area could be used in more intelligent ways.