Why? Charitable donations are down from 5 years ago. What makes you think they would go up for things the government should be fixing?

Because the culture of charity is changing because of the internet. It's become catered to specific wants and the ease + anonymity of it are a few reasons why.

Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Twitch. People are rushing to their computers to donate money towards causes that have no personal impact.

I joked earlier about sending a webcam girl to college, but this is a real happening thing.

google donate money to your school

We should force parents pay for their kids schooling and get the State out of the school business. If the parents have no money, make the parents take out a student loan. If the parents fail to pay it back, make the kid pay for it when h or she hits 21. Then take the house if they fail to pay.

You still forcing the parents to send their kids to school?

Would any standards be enforced?

Which one of those are charities? I thought those were for small companies to find alternative ways to finance their business. The things I've donated too on kickstarter were not out of a sense of charity but were because I wanted the cool things they were selling. People wanting to spend money on cool things doesn't mean they are going to want to spend money on boring things they pay taxes for.

Twitch is a billion dollar company built and continued to be built by donations to watch people play videogames in their mother's basement. The point is there is very little incentive to donate yet people still do because it's something they believe in. A $5 subscription goes half to Twitch and half to the person streaming. You can chose to donate directly to the streamer, but you don't get a chat badge and use of custom emoticons if you do.

Now take Twitch and replace "nerd playing Mario Bros." with "fixing potholes in your city", and "nerds who like watching gamers" with "people who drive cars and have jobs".

You really don't understand what Charity is do you? People like to watch people play video games, that's the market that Twitch is serving, you still haven't shown that people want to give money for things their taxes pay for.

But we pay taxes and still have ****ty roads. It's not a far cry to suggest their taxes are doing a bad job of paying for it.

You can just fix the potholes yourself:

To Fix A Few Potholes, 'Guerrilla' Group Takes Matters Into Its Own Hands

Good point, I can't believe people are willing to pay for underground parking or parking in general or even toll boothes!

Sigh. Those things aren't paid for by taxes either. Well, maybe toll roads who knows with those. You guys still haven't shown there is any reason to think more people paying for goods and services means more people would pay for infrastructure fixes that they are already paying taxes for.

Have you shown any reason to think they wouldn't?

Two things and then I'm out (gotta get my record player fixed):

- This isn't charity. Nor does this have anything to do with semantics.

- kerowo, people are not willing to pay more money under current conditions because they think it's useless, not because they are not willing to donate.

I like tuma's strategy of ignoring decades of economic research and theory in favor of how he feels people think

Yes.

Oh well if they ever seriously try I will happily bet you it raises money.

Obviously not a bet you would take.

What's the question we are really asking here?

1) If the government set up a crowdfunding mechanism that allowed people to contribute $ to roads/schools/X public good that is currently funded by taxes, would people contribute? Almost certainly some people would, just like some people already participate in things like the Adopt-A-Highway program, public school bake sales, etc.

2) (The more important question, IMO) Would crowdfunding be a "better" method of funding public goods than taxes?
I don't think so, for a few reasons.

-As others have mentioned, the free rider problem. When the benefit that a person receives from a good/service is hard to quantify and when people cannot be excluded from the good even if they don't contribute, people are likely to underinvest in that good or service. Even if I recognize that good roads have, *some* value to me, how do I know how much value? And if I'm wrong in my estimate, do you think I'm likely to err on the high side or the low side? And when everyone goes low, how does that funding look on a system-wide level?

- Large infrastructure projects take time and need to be funded over a long period of time. While government budgets can fluctuate, they seem more stable and reliable than crowdfunding.

- Allocation of funds. There are some serious potential wealth inequality issues here. I would think that we all agree that the utility of fixing one bridge that is about to collapse is much higher than say the utility of adding landscaping to medians in a neighborhood where the roads are already safe. But, rich folks might be more willing to donate money to make the roads they actually drive on more beautiful than to repair a bridge in some poor neighborhood that they never drive through. This issue isn't necesarily insurmountable, but you would have to put a lot of thought and effort into figuring out how granular you wanted the projects to be and how much flexibility the recipients would be given to decide what improvements were most needed.

Their stuff is simplistic. The reason this wouldn't work has nothing to do with the flux of $$.

The concerns about whether it's a good idea are real but mostly it's just that mass direct individual participation in government is a coming idea rather than anything established.