What policy or program would you pay more taxes to support?

Universal Health Care

This. Absolute game changer. If my job gave me the money they spend on my behalf for the crappy health insurance they provide, it would likely result in an actual increase in my net pay after the increased taxes to pay for the program. Cut out hundreds of thousands of parasitic middlemen, like insurers and pharmacy benefit managers. Throw out the crazy quilt of non-doctors who decide what medications and procedures are are covered. Reduce billing staff because of the major paperwork reduction (don't need to deal with hundreds of different insurance plans). And do away with coding - the letters and numbers on a bill that can drastically change a procedure's cost to the patient.
- “Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents 1 million, 2 million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”
  -Barack Obama, 2006

Single p(l)ayer healthcare.

Pre-k childcare

Court room staffers

I generally recommend seeing a doctor (multiplayer) instead of single player. There are cases of doctors doing surgery on themselves, but it's as rare as it is dangerous.
- We have single player at home already.
  Thanks for the catch XD
I haven't seen much discussion about the third one, what would that be about?
- One of the reasons billionaires can "clog up the system" is because Judges are actually really overworked.
  In Trump's Florida case there were only 5 judges who could potentially handle the case, 2 of them were retired and temporarily filing in to keep the system moving, and 3 of them were already booked out for the rest of the year, Eileen Cannon was a 50-50 draw for Trump in that district.
  Many cases plea out because it would take so long to go through the system, that between the waiting for the start of the trial and not getting time served it's less time to just take a plea.
  Bi-partisan bill to change temp judges to full time judges heading to the house. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/senate-passed-bill-on-judgeships-aims-to-help-overworked-courts
  More lawyers than judges has created a 2-tier justice system some world war 2. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/our-overloaded-judicial-system-what-cause-there-remedy
  Pandemic broke the system that was hanging by a thread. https://stateline.org/2024/01/25/shortage-of-prosecutors-judges-leads-to-widespread-court-backlogs/

Jury duty stipends indexed to cost of living.

Today, in my county, you get $20 a day. That won't even cover parking near the courthouse.

Serving on a jury shouldn't prevent you from being able to make rent for the month.

I recently found out that if you're in casual work that is enough to be excused in Australia. It's not on the paperwork they send you so most people don't know.

Funding the IRS to go after rich tax cheats.

Public healthcare, public education, public internet

Let's do one that wouldn't end up saving the taxpayer in the long run.

Universal access to legal council.

Too many matters are not brought to the court which probably should be because of costs to the litigants, and far too many times are costs to the litigants used as a weapon to keep people from exercizing their rights under threat of getting buried.

It's the worst kept secret that whoever has more money is gonna win the case 9/10 times and making lawyers salaried public servants as opposed to hired mercenary litigants, and providing access to legal services and council for free at point of service, would go a long way towards balancing the litigious inequality that is often experienced in the US.

So yeah, I'd pay more in taxes for the little guy to have the deck not be so blatantly stacked against them in the judicial system.

Education. Mental health facilities. Drug treatment. Healthcare.

Improved access to mental health treatment. We have free healthcare here, but the mental health side isn't great. This would also include support for those who are neurodivergant, suffering from trauma, experiencing gender dysphoria, etc..

Honestly, I think something that would be good as a policy is that at least once a year schoolchildren see a counsellor. Just to talk about anything that's bothering them, and give them help for things that are happening in their home life.

While I agree with this, I'm a bit hesitant of the implementation. I have received mental health (MH) care from the Veterans Affairs (VA) and private providers. Private providers are in another level of care to the point that I pay out of pocket rather than go to the VA where they basically treat me like a problem to their life, liar seeking disability and drugs, and child that needs babysitting. They can be some gaslighting jerks. If we get universal health care including mental health, I would hope that it would follow something like Medicare that pays for private providers of our choosing rather than setting up a government agency that provides it directly.
For example, I received VA MH care for about 7 years. They declined to give me an ADHD assessment when I told them I have considerable attention issues. The psychiatrist literally looked away from his computer, looked at me, and said, "I'm not going to give you stimulants." I was then diagnosed with bipolar 2 and placed on antipsychotics for 5 years until I insisted against medical advice to come off of them. I also sought care for traumatic events, which they told me weren't traumatic. A friend that is a psychologist then told me that I was autistic. I asked the VA for an autism assessment. The VA psychologist already agreed I was likely autistic, but told me that her supervisor declined to allow an autism assessment, "Since [I] was in the military, [I] can't be autistic." After telling friends this and listening to their advice, I sought private care. They assessed me thoroughly and diagnosed me with autism and ADHD. I was then referred to a psychiatrist and prescribed ADHD meds. My life hasn't been this put together ever. I honestly think VA MH made my life worse, resulted in poor relationships, hampered my career, and caused some deep trust issues.
- That's a problem here as well. I'm hoping that if we invest more resources into it, they'll not feel that they have to withhold and prioritise treatment. Give them the resources to treat everyone, rather than the few who tick all the right boxes.
  Although that's just wishful thinking on my part, most likely. And probably also requires social change as well as economic...

It's not so much about paying more, but rather directing where my taxes go. I already pay out the ass in taxes where I live, I'd just rather see my hard-earned income spent on public comprehensive healthcare... primary and undergrad education... automating as much production as possible... universal basic income.

Not blowing people up. Not digging for oil. Not bailing out corporations. And CERTAINLY not funding police with military surplus used to oppress and murder our very own citizens.

The people using my money for those purposes, and more, can go Fuck themselves to death. Preferably in the least enjoyable way possible.

Every social safety net we can get. I'm in the US with near zero safety nets.

Better public education
Better public transit
Fully funding the IRS to go after tax evaders
Public healthcare

Transit is a big one for me. I firmly believe a lot of things get better for people when you can just get around easier. No requirements to be able to drive, no requirements for licenses, you can live in more affordable neighborhoods while working Ina completely different place. The list goes on

Funding for public defenders. They're chronicly overworked and understaffed.

job / income safety nets

universal health care

better public transpo and infra to support

public internet / utilities

housing

libraries

Universal access to quality food and shelter.

An few orders of magnitude more IRS agents and people armed with pitchforks pointed at the oligarchy and corruption.

Anything that doesn't just funnel money back to millionaires. I've never understood people's aversion to tax, especially when they should be focusing on the rigged two party system that is at the core of the wastage.

If I have to choose one, universal basic income, it solves a lot of problems. It can help people in need, but if you want to be selfish about it, at least it lowers the odds that someone will rob your house.

As for people worried about making sure it goes to the right people, I would rather pay a few scammers than risk having someone in genuine need suffer

I would increase funding for parks. Trash cleanup and trimming plants is an easy way to make it look nice and employ people who need a part time job.

Auditing the government and its agencies

I still can't believe we can't get a completed audit of the DoD. Just a trillion dollar black hole.
- What is the DoD? I assume something US-specific?

bike infrastructure.

Healthcare.

Mental and dental

Better and cheaper healthcare and education.

Support for male victims of family violence which currently has less funding in my country than pets do.

Greater tax enforcement and higher taxes on capital gains. Being a rentier or investor should not grant advtanfe over anyone who works for a living.

Public universities. Tuition expenses, salaries, and especially avoiding students from getting rejected.

I would like the ability to choose (within limits) where my taxes go.

Say 60% always goes to 'general' and then you get to send the rest to health, education, military etc. as you choose.

Increased support for Ukraine.

It's at the moment more important than solving any domestic issues.

(I most likely don't live in your country, only argue for your favored domestic issues if you really have nothing better to do).

Where I am, transit for damn sure. That is the one thing keeping us from being a great city

Well, to pull up some things that I've groused about on the Threadiverse recently:

In the US, I'd probably support more federal education subsidy, though I'd be also fine with individuals paying more for it. What I would like to see is states paying less, as if people move from state to state, the state that loses population is paying the bill to educate the labor force of the state gaining population, though, so I don't know if that'd meet your concern for "cutting taxes". I'd be okay with paying more to iron out a misincentive, though.

I've wanted the government to deal with looking into existential AI threats. I don't think that it makes sense for private industry to do so -- the incentives there just don't make sense. That'd take funds.

The same would go for certain other technologies that have potential to create existential risks. I don't know what the situation is for genetic engineering, but I expect that there will come a point in time that we are capable-enough at genetic engineering that we can create some pretty unpleasant self-replicating things.

We don't have self-replicating nano-machines either, but those would be something of an analogous risk; this is the gray goo scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

Gray goo (also spelled as grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy (the literal consumption of the ecosystem).[3] The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.

All three of those deal with technologies where one can create systems that rapidly expand without control and which I'd expect to become increasingly-accessible to humanity.

Military: I don't think that we have an effective counter for small UAVs today. This one we're already looking into. The closest thing we have in Ukraine today is maybe VAMPIRE (a vehicle-mounted system that launches APKWS missiles at aircraft). That's relatively cheap as anti-aircraft systems go, but it's still much more costly even in just per-shot variable cost low-end drones. China has enormous production capacity of low-end UAVs.

There are some policies that I think that it's probably most-appropriate for government to tackle, and I'm sure that dealing with them would cost something, but I'm not sure that the main barrier here is the money.

I'm not really a big fan of having radio devices broadcasting unique IDs from a tracking standpoint; a number of widely-used protocols do this. Tire pressure sensors are mandated by government do this. I think that it would be hard to avoid this without government involvement. Industry has little incentive to avoid this.

I think that we still have glaring problems with computer security as things stand; it's an area where I don't think that we are where we'd like to be in 2024, given how connected the world is. I don't have a specific program that could be funded that would fix the problems. In the past, there's been government-funded research here. It has maybe mitigated some problems; I think that Windows having a SAK was probably the result of government requirements.

I've complained about a lack of financial literacy education being made available in public schools. That'd cost something. But I don't know if that could really be a "spend more" thing, since unless one is going to extend time spent in school, it'd involve cutting something else.

I don't have any concrete pet projects, but I've generally not objected to funding basic research on outer space. Cosmology doesn't really have much of a route to a direct return; it's not really something for private industry. But I think that there's value to humanity building its understanding of the universe. NASA's had a list of projects that it had to cut to cover expanding James Webb Space Telescope costs; that may have been a reasonable prioritization, but I kind of regret that we had to give those up, even if they don't directly buy me much other than some novel science stories.

Work towards colonizing outer space is also something that I don't think has a whole lot of near-term potential for commercial return, but I'd like to see it happen -- probably nowhere near within my lifetime -- as maybe one of the better routes to help provide a backup for humanity. It might provide great benefits, but the window for that is just too long for private industry to deal with. It is probably a project that will span a number of generations, but some generation needs to start if it is to happen.

Hmm. I mean, for something to be the remit of government, I'd say that it generally should deal with internalizing an externality or being something that private industry just can't handle, and that's usually due to scale. I'm sure that there are some other things that'd fall under that category. Looking at the above:

National defense should be done by government, because it deals with internalizing an externality; national defense is a public good.
Changing who pays for education away from state level deals with internalizing an externality.
Privacy in radio systems, at least insofar as it applies to systems where network effect applies -- like, say, the Bluetooth network -- involves internalizing an externality; my decision to purchase a device that increases lock-in to a network that limits someone else's privacy has a negative externality for them.
Computer security has something of a positive externality in that compromise of one device can lead to an attack vector to another. It also runs into a problem where a device is difficult for an end-user to assess the security of; that's not an externality, but having informed consumers is a requirement for an efficient market. I don't know if it's really possible for most consumers to ever reasonably be sufficiently-informed to assess the security of computing devices that they buy across-the-board. It's like asking someone to assess the safety of an aircraft before riding it (where we solved the problem differently, without government spending, by assigning strict liability to manufacturers...maybe we could do that for computers, but that'd kinda kill open source, and I don't much like that idea).
Financial literacy education...hmm. I guess I could also live with that being in private schools or homeschooling or whatever. It doesn't have to be public schools. But since most people in the US attend a public school, improving the situation there pretty much requires government action.
Basic research on some things like outer space...I guess I'd say that that provides some benefit. It's non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so it's a public good with positive externalities.
Colonizing outer space is just outside the kind of time window, I think, that private industry can handle today.

If they tied every expenditure to a tax that is directly related to the expenditure I'd like taxes. No more big pot of money. Military paid for by it's own tax from commerce that benefits from a military. Roads paid for by taxes on car sales or registration tax PR something, etc.