Would it be politically viable to campaign for EA tax? Like a very small (but extremely important) tax that’s used exclusively to fund EA charities?
Or for allocation of some small part of government spending on EA charities, like 1%?
1% is not a huge number, but given the enormous sizes of government budgets, it would FLOOD EA charities with money. Probably all the needs of current EA charities would be filled and EA would need to find other less effective cause areas. Which is great.
Perhaps saving a life would become more expensive, it would go to $10,000 or even more. The more expensive it is, the better. The goal is for this price to go to infinity, that is, that no more lives can be saved with donations, because all the preventable causes of death have been prevented.
If not 1% how much? Is there any percentage that would be politically viable?
What’s the maximum?
In which country is such an initiative most likely to succeed?
My idea is perhaps countries like New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden...
But if one country adopted such a policy, it could motivate others to follow the suit.
Any potential drawbacks?
Perhaps regular people would be less motivated to donate if this was covered by governments?
But perhaps even if many countries allocated 1%, there would still be need for place for donations by individuals?
No, this wouldn’t be politically viable. Taxes are unpopular, the vast majority of people (including both voters and politicians) have no idea what EA is, and many people don’t like EA and would be vocally opposed to something like this.
However, there may be vaguely similar ideas that might work to a limited degree. I remember hearing about an idea where employers could nudge their employees to donate 1% of their paycheque to charity and give them a list of recommended options. Something like that could work — a nudge toward voluntary giving in a way that reduces the friction of giving, the mental load of figuring it out and the admin work of arranging it.
To the extent governments fund EA priorities, it will be on a case-by-case basis (e.g. X amount of money to Y foreign aid initiative), rather than a general “EA” bucket where money goes.
Maybe 0.1% of government budget would be viable, what do you think?
There are many upsides for the government—they could brag about how many people they saved, they could be seen as more progressive than other countries, and they could make EA more widely recognized.
But perhaps they would need to be very careful about how they go about it. Probably choose human and farm animal charities, some split between the 2 but no less than 50% to human charities. Perhaps some allocation to X-risk as well. I’d probably go like this: 10% X-risk, 50% human charities, 40% farm animal charities.
Here’s what I calculated: A budget of very small political entity in Bosnia (not the whole country) in which I live is around $3.2 billion. 0.1% of this is $3.2 million. 50% of this that would go to human charities is $1.6 million. Divided by $5000 (per life saved) that could save around 320 lives per year. And that’s just 0.05% of the budget that would be allocated to human charities.
What you said in this reply is covered in my original answer. Many governments already have a foreign aid budget.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dTdSnbBB2g65b2Fb9/eaf-s-ballot-initiative-doubled-zurich-s-development-aid
The city of Zurich, Switzerland passed a law to increase their development budget and spend it effectivly. This process was initiated by a group of EAs. Is that what you had in mind?
This seems like a good initiative, I wasn’t aware of that. My idea was to more explicitly redirect some very small percentage of budget to effective charities. Probably human charities would be most politically viable, and also great for optics, as they could say “our donation saved so and so lives”.