David Boaz of the Cato Institute:

In his 1992 Republican National Convention speech, President George H. W. Bush proposed letting taxpayers commit up to 10 percent of their payment to reducing the national debt. The proposal never went anywhere, but it points to a good idea: Taxpayers should be able to designate how their tax dollars are spent. Already, we allow for this in very limited ways. A check-off at the top of the 1040 form invites every taxpayer to direct $3 of their federal tax to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (only 6 percent of taxpayers do). In Virginia, my VAC invites me to contribute additional funds to more than 100 organizations ranging from the Democratic and Republican parties to the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Virginia Arts Foundation, and many local school and library funds.

Why not take this one step further? Why shouldn’t taxpayers make direct decisions about how much money they want to spend on other government programs, like paying off the national debt, the war in Iraq or the National Endowment for the Arts? This would force the federal government to focus time and resources on projects citizens actually want, not just efforts that appeal to special interests.

To do  this, we’d have to expand the concept of the campaign financing checkoff to all government programs. With this reform, the real expression of popular democracy would take place not every four years but every April 15. A new final page of the 1040 form would be created, called 1040-D (for democracy). At the top, the taxpayer would write in his total tax as determined by the 1040 form. Following would be a list of government programs, along with the percentage of the federal budget devoted to each (as proposed by Congress and the president). The taxpayer would then multiply that percentage by his total tax to determine the “amount requested” in order to meet the government’s total spending request. (Computerization of tax returns has made this step simple.) The taxpayer would then consider that request and enter the amount he was willing to pay for that program in the final column–the amount requested by the government, or more, or less, down to zero.

A taxpayer who thinks that $600 billion is too much to spend on military in the post-Cold War era could choose to allocate less to that function than the government requested. A taxpayer who thinks that Congress has been underfunding Head Start and the arts could allocate double the requested amount for those programs.

There would be quite a bit of debate, of course, over how to list programs in the 1040-D program. Spending interests would want to use broad categories–national defense, health, education, job training. Opponents of spending would prefer to narrow the categories so taxpayers can see what they’re really buying– defense of Japan and Korea, war in Iraq, farm subsidies, mass-transit “demonstration” projects in West Virginia, and so on. Libertarians and the arts establishment might agree on listing just “arts,” while the religious right might lobby to have the category broken into “fine arts,” “pork-barrel arts,” and “obscene art.” Language would be an issue – “corporate welfare” or “loans for small businesses”?

Real budget democracy, of course, means not just that the taxpayers can decide where their money will go but also that they can decide how much of their money the government is entitled to. Thus the last line on the 1040-D form must be “Tax refund.”  The form would indicate that none of the taxpayer’s duly calculated tax should be refunded to him; but under budget democracy the taxpayer would have the right to allocate less than the amount requested for some or all programs in order to claim a refund (beyond whatever excess withholding is already due him).

Entitlements would be the biggest problem. About 60 percent of the federal budget now goes to entitlement programs. Medicare and Medicaid make up more than 20 percent of spending, and most of that comes from general revenues. Should taxpayers be able to withhold their hard-earned dollars from such programs? In a free society, they should. So how do we handle a shortage of funding? Congress could change the spending parameters to fit what the taxpayers are willing to supply. The budget democracy process could also include a provision allowing Congress by a two-thirds vote to override the taxpayers and insist on larger payments to pay for entitlements or other services deemed essential.

Then, instead of trying to decide which candidate might be telling the truth about his commitment to fiscal responsibility, the taxpayers could take matters into their own hands, finally being able to say effectively, “You’re spending too much. We’re cutting your budget.”

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto dares to criticize Hillary Clinton:

“I think it’s fair to say that . . . the deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top,” declared Hillary Clinton in Monticello, Iowa, yesterday. She might have added: And that’s why it is clear even now that I am going to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

National Journal reports that Mrs. Clinton was “speaking to just 22 people.” That’s true if your definition of “person” excludes corporations—specifically media corporations—and their employees, for “those [22] Iowans were far outnumbered by the dozens of reporters who were bunched together behind a thin yellow rope at the back of the room”:

Bigger yet was the press crowd outside, where reporters who weren’t admitted to the event chased Clinton’s van when it first pulled up here, contributing to the feeling of a media circus surrounding the former secretary of State’s Iowa launch.

And quite a scene that was. “MSNBC’s Clinton beat reporter Alex Seitz-Wald heroically remained in place and on camera Tuesday afternoon as the rest of the political press corps chased Hillary Clinton’s so-called Scooby Van upon its arrival at a roundtable meet and greet in Iowa,” Mediaite reports.

The video, which appears at the bottom of the Mediaite report, is funny. Funnier still is the Washington Free Beacon’s speeded-up Vine loop of the scene. Funniest of all would be the WFB loop set to the theme music from “The Benny Hill Show.” HotAir.com headlines a post on the scene “What the First Amendment Was Made For.”

Mediaite also notes that Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin—last seen scoffing at the wild notion that Mrs. Clinton “is enjoying a honeymoon w/ the media,” showed up yesterday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where he exulted over Mrs. Clinton’s visit to an Ohio Chipotle:

“Her problem is not to prove to people that she’s ready for president,” . . . Halperin said. “The two words she needs are fun and new. And part of why [Monday] was so successful is, she looks like she’s having fun and she’s doing, for her, new stuff. We’ve never seen her get a burrito before.”

Maybe not, but as the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper reports, she is not a stranger to the Chipotle brand. Last year, the Mexican fast-food chain’s co-CEO Monty Moran spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative, part of the Clinton family’s gigabuck nonprofit empire: “The title of Moran’s panel discussion was, ‘The Case for Economic Justice.’ It was moderated by then Meet the Press host David Gregory.” (Come to think of it, maybe Halperin’s point was that “honeymoon” is an inapt metaphor given the duration of the Clinton-media relationship.)

Elaborating on the stacked-deck theme, Mrs. Clinton complained: “There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker.” According to Salary.com, Moran’s compensation in 2014 was $28,153,202, mostly in stock-option grants. If the Chipotle workers who prepared and served Mrs. Clinton’s burrito are typical, then, each makes a little under $94,000 a year—nice work if you can get it.

As if that isn’t unfair enough, HotAir’s Ed Morrissey notes that in 2013 Mrs. Clinton received a mere $14 million advance for her memoir “Hard Choices.” That’s less than half of Moran’s annual earnings! No wonder Mrs. Clinton was reduced to scraping up $300,000 speaking honorariums just to make ends meet.

Mrs. Clinton gave the Washington Post “a brief interview” yesterday, during which she “said she had developed a plan to overhaul the way money is spent in political campaigns”:

Earlier in the day she said she wanted to fix the country’s “dysfunctional” campaign finance system, even backing a constitutional amendment if necessary.

Asked about her campaign finance agenda, Clinton said, “We do have a plan. We have a plan for my plan.”

It’s reminiscent of what they said about Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign-finance ideas: A man, a plan, a plan for a plan, a plan for a plan for a canal, a plan for . . .

One thing Mrs. Clinton isn’t planning is a shoestring operation. The New York Times reported Saturday that her campaign combined with “the outside groups supporting her candidacy” is “expected to be a $2.5 billion effort, dwarfing the vast majority of her would-be rivals in both parties.” In 2012 Politico put the equivalent figures for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, respectively, at $1.123 billion and $1.019 billion—less combined than the expected Clinton total.

“When The Post asked about the role of Priorities USA Action, a pro-Clinton super PAC currently trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to help her campaign, [Mrs.] Clinton shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘I don’t know.’ ” (At least she didn’t say, “What difference does it make?”) That’s enough to satisfy Slate’s Beth Ethier:

While Clinton’s detractors will almost certainly accuse her of hypocrisy for denouncing the loosened restrictions on fundraising that have allowed her shadow campaign to amass a huge war chest, the Citizens United ruling offers an airtight defense: Since she is not allowed to “coordinate” with her unofficial army, she couldn’t make them stop spending money on her, even if she wanted to.

That would be a non sequitur if it weren’t two non sequiturs. First, the source of the “coordination” ban is not Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) but Congress, which in the 1970s enacted legislation that treats “expenditures controlled by or coordinated with the candidate” as campaign contributions. It was in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) that the Supreme Court held that limits on independent expenditures—in which such control or coordination was absent—were unconstitutional violations of free speech, “with only one Justice dissenting,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in Citizens United.

Second, while it’s technically true that Mrs. Clinton “couldn’t make them stop spending money,” it’s far-fetched to suggest that a public renunciation of Priorities USA Action’s support would count as illegal coordination unless it was backed up (or undermined) by some behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

The expected wealth of Mrs. Clinton’s and her supporters’ campaigns exemplifies how campaign-finance restrictions stack the deck “in favor of those already at the top,” namely incumbents. Obama and Romney might have been close to parity in the campaign-money department, but the president had no primary challenge, which meant he could spend his primary war chest to get a jump on the general election. Mrs. Clinton is not an incumbent, but unless a serious challenge emerges for the Democratic nomination, she will be situated as if she were one.

Mrs. Clinton’s most outrageous hypocrisy, however, rests in her call to amend the Constitution to curtail free speech. This has been a popular position on the left since Citizens United. As we noted in September, by that time all but a handful of Senate Democrats had signed on as co-sponsors of a resolution to propose an amendment for near-total repeal of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. In this regard, as in much else, Mrs. Clinton is a follower, not a leader.

But she is a follower in a particularly awkward way, for Citizens United was not just about freedom of speech. It was also about Hillary Clinton. Here is Justice Kennedy’s outline of the facts of the case (citations omitted):

In January 2008, Citizens United released a film entitled Hillary: The Movie. . . . It is a 90-minute documentary about then-Senator Hillary Clinton, who was a candidate in the Democratic Party’s 2008 Presidential primary elections. Hillary mentions Senator Clinton by name and depicts interviews with political commentators and other persons, most of them quite critical of Senator Clinton. Hillary was released in theaters and on DVD, but Citizens United wanted to increase distribution by making it available through video-on-demand. . . .

In December 2007, a cable company offered, for a payment of $1.2 million, to make Hillary available on a video-on-demand channel called “Elections ’08.” Some video-on-demand services require viewers to pay a small fee to view a selected program, but here the proposal was to make Hillary available to viewers free of charge.

To implement the proposal, Citizens United was prepared to pay for the video-on-demand; and to promote the film, it produced two 10-second ads and one 30-second ad for Hillary. Each ad includes a short (and, in our view, pejorative) statement about Senator Clinton, followed by the name of the movie and the movie’s Website address. Citizens United desired to promote the video-on-demand offering by running advertisements on broadcast and cable television.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that the FEC had the legal authority to suppress the movie “because it was ‘susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her.’ ”

Now, in a bitter foretaste of life in “a President Hillary Clinton world,” Mrs. Clinton is urging an amendment to the Constitution to do away with the right to criticize her.

Related news comes from the Daily Caller:

Do you work in the media and have the gall to think that the entire Webster’s dictionary is at your disposal? Think again, you sexist.

When it comes to reporting on Hillary Clinton, George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” have turned into “Twelve Words You Can Never Say About a Powerful Politician.”

“We will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism,” the pro-Hillary group HRC Super Volunteers warned The New York Times’ Amy Chozick …

What are those words?

• Polarizing.
• Calculating.
• Disingenuous.
• Insincere.
• Ambitious.
• Inevitable.
• Entitled.
• Overconfident.
• Secretive.
• “Will do anything to win.”
• “Represents the past.”
• “Out of touch.”

There are two words that are pretty meaningless — “polarizing” (so what?) and “ambitious.” Every other word or phrase clearly does apply to Hillary Clinton.

And if Hillary supporters don’t like using any of those verboten words, they really won’t like what D.C. Clothesline did to Hillary’s campaign logo: