You clearly have not thought thru the practical implications of such a process. Firstly, the political camps do not divide that easily - there is a full spectrum of ideologies out there and finding agreement on the relative importance of any one area would be almost impossible.
Second, just think about the thousands and thousands of individual programs that would have to itemized and approved - and what proportion of your taxes should be applied specifically? There would be zero tolerance with the American people to spending hours going thru such a laundry list of programs deciding to give $3 to the FAA, $5 to the Army, etc. The administrative overhead alone would be astronomical.
Thirdly, a program such as your idea basically strips the ārepresentativeā out of our representative democracy. If you donāt like what your taxes are being spent on then do the one thing our founders intentionally put in place in order to institute change - vote! Feel free to vote your values but donāt be upset that others vote theirs and respect the fact that their values may be different from yours.
Being neither liberal nor conservative, Iām aware that ideologies do not divide cleanly. I was simply using a broad example as a way to make a point. After all, one cannot possibly cover every detail of such an idea in a comment to a blog post.
I will say that in such a system representatives would still play a role, but they would have a much more specific mandate on how to spending bills. Thatās hardly undermining them, in fact one would think that if their goal is really to represent the will of their constituents they would welcome such a system.
