Frustration with taxes and government spending is high these
days. Specific opinions as to where
the government is overspending are fewer and farther between. Most taxpayers
don't know what they'd like to see cut, partly because they don't know how the
spending breaks down in the first place. (Elected officials are often hesitant
to get specific as well; that's a topic for another post.)

The policy proposals offered by Third Way—a leading
center-left think tank—often disappoint with their oh-so-careful incrementalism.  But here I think they're right on: when
you pay your federal income taxes, you ought to get an itemized receipt. In a policy
brief (pdf) published last month, Third Way's David Kendall and Jim Kessler
make the case for such a service and explain how it could easily be
implemented.

Here's a sample receipt for a middle-class earner:

I'm a fierce (and somewhat excitable) supporter of passenger
rail, and whenever I get going on this someone inevitably points out that
highways, unlike train tracks, are paid for with fuel taxes. Of course, the
government routinely makes up for highway-funding shortfalls using the general
revenue—to the tune of 28 times more than it spends on Amtrak. In fact, this
supplemental highway spending accounts for a larger share of our federal income
tax than Amtrak, Pell Grants, the EPA, Head Start, national parks and arts
funding combined, to name just a few things for which your support may brand
you a big-government liberal.

Next time I get into one of these debates, it would be
helpful to have Third Way's sample receipt in my pocket.

While rail-vs.-highway spending happens to be a pet issue of
mine, the most obvious things the above list highlights are the spending
behemoths at the top: Social Security, health care, the military and interest
on the national debt. If nothing else, an itemized receipt would say, "So you
want to talk about reducing government spending? Talk about these things
first." Which would be a far more focused public conversation than we're having
now.

Income-tax receipts aren't a new idea; people have been
proposing this sort of thing for years. If we can put a man on the moon and
then, 40 years later, persist in spending almost three times more on the space
program than we do on housing for poor people, we ought to be able to print a
receipt that says so.