I remember one of my first conversations with a friend, who quickly became a client. She told me “Honey, I don’t mind paying my taxes. It goes toward our maintaining our roads and our beautiful parks and the great outdoors.” She whole heartedly convinced herself of this. To her it was fact. Her tax dollars go to very specific parts of managing our country.

She caught me off guard with her comment. For a hot second I thought she was on to something. Did the IRS have a program that I had no idea about? I quickly realized that it is her way of making peace with paying taxes. It’s too difficult and painful to think of all the ways we disagree with how our tax dollars are spent.

Imagine feeling great about paying your taxes or being happily eager to file your returns. Leave it to the wise geeks at WiseGeek to further ponder the idea. Read their article about personal tax earmarking. They offer a very detailed plan of how we could revamp tax paying altogether.

Simply put, a portion of each government agency budget would be determined by tax payers. Individual tax payers would use the IRS website to locate the agency they would like to support. We would allocate our money on a first come, first served basis. This may encourage more people to pay their taxes on time! File early enough and you could pay for self-sustaining local farms. File late and funding military defense may be your only option.

The article makes several intriguing points. This system might encourage tax payers to be more informed about the national budget. It might also give us a closer sense of ownership of our government. Either way, perhaps it’s time to consider finding a way to make paying taxes less painful.

I immediately began wondering what I would do. If I were to earmark my tax dollars they would go to directly funding arts and music programs in public schools. I would also allocate a portion to protecting the oceans.

What would you do? Would you vote to support a tax paying system like this? Where would you earmark your tax dollars? And, if you’re a late filer, would tax earmarking encourage you to file sooner? Share your ideas with other Queercents readers below!