America has pledged not to use anti-personnel landmines(APL) anywhere outside of the Korean peninsula. I suspect (although obviously can't confirm) America has reserved this right but probably does not exercise it.
> The United States is the world’s single largest financial supporter of humanitarian mine action, which includes not only clearance of landmines, but also medical rehabilitation and vocational training for those injured by landmines and other explosive remnants of war. Since the United States Humanitarian Mine Action Program was established in 1993, the United States has provided over $2.3 billion in aid in over 90 countries for conventional weapons destruction programs.[0]
While I am quite cynical and definitively against a lot of the ways our military has been employed, the degree of safety and the diplomatic security I receive as a result of it, provides more utility to me than a parking lot.
More broadly, roads and localized infrastructure are quite important, as is the military. I agree that personally I would allocate more money for infrastructure than to the military, and agree if this is the point you were making. I do want to illustrate the counterpoints that many people (once again, not me personally) would "Rather have their names on the bombs that kill terrorists"[1], than on a highway.
I don't live in America. And my country makes all kinds of crap. Clusterbombs and what not. The landmine was meant as an illustration, not as a particular item, it could just as well have been a clusterbomb or some other intrinsically negative item.
Sorry, that was a pretty ethnocentric assumption on my part. A case could be made that landmines are intrinsically negative as they are non-discriminating hazards that render large portions of land unsafe well after a conflict has ended. Bombs, missiles tanks etc, I am not so sure of. I would appraise them as neutral, with the potential to be negative or positive.
Are you saying that if there are more effective ways of raising money, governments necessarily know about them? I'm on your side with regards to taxing, but governments are slow-moving beasts that are often controlled by ideological moves rather than practical ones.
They obviously don't take in anything more than a trivial amount of money. If you think that people would donate an equivalent amount of money if their taxes were eliminated - then you must have an awful lot of faith in people's inherent generosity in the face of their own self-interest. The economically optimal decision for any one person is to not give, but in the aggregate that means we don't have funding for infrastructure, research, etc.
Governments have tried plenty of ways of raising money other than tax (inflation is the classic one), but I don't think we have found a better way. While governments are not nimble, they have had a long history of testing alternative ways of paying for the things other than taxes and so far all have proved worse in the long term.
The one exception to all of this is war where people will effectively donate by buying things like war bonds or agreeing to charge non-market rates for goods, but as a solution for taxation war is hardly ideal. As I said I hate taxes, but I hate no taxes more.
It is not a donation, because you don't get chose not to pay. You get to choose where to send the money. I don't see how this couldn't work with a high portion of the money.
Because we should budget for the cost of actual programs, and not have to guess based on how much various constituencies might allocate their tax dollars.
This is why taxes cannot be donations. Indeed, they are not donations.
I remember the people at institutional giving at my old college say that nobody wants their name on a parking lot.