Monday, May 17, 2010

Government site accepts donations to pay down debt

This is hilarious.
https://www.pay.gov/paygov/forms/formInstance.html?nc=1271991815942&agencyFormId=23779454
"Welcome to the United States Treasury's site for making donations to help reduce the public debt. If you would like to make a donation, please fill in the required fields
and click the Submit Data button when completed."
"Thank you for your contribution which will be deposited to the account "Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt." Your contribution is accepted under the provisions of 31 U.S.C. 3113 which authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to accept conditional gifts to the United States for the purpose of reducing the public debt."

1 comment:

  1. Per http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/:

    - The Outstanding Public Debt as of 17 May 2010 at 08:39:12 PM GMT is $12,938,720,236,687.76
    - The estimated population of the United States is 308,392,387
    - so each citizen's share of this debt is $41,955.38.

    I predict it will be paid off in no time.

    Donations have always been an option. Years (maybe decades) ago I think there was a line on tax forms to make a donation (most cities in MI still have a donation line).

    If you use a credit card to pay income taxes there is a credit card processing fee (most municipalities do the same with property taxes). The law doesn't allow the department of treasury to pay the merchant card fees. So the payment is set up through a third party which then charges a 3.5% fee. I've noticed they don't have that for the online donations. If treasury isn't allowed to pay merchant fees, I wonder how they got around that.

    Maybe we could get a few million people to make a 1¢ donation every week. The credit card processing fees and the bandwidth costs could be devastating.

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