My submissions to yourPAbudget.com

This is a new privately funded website aimed at giving voice to money-saving ideas. The ideas are all listed one after another with buttons to the right so you can vote to agree or disagree with them. Friday’s (6/18/10) Inquirer says the site, launched Wednesday by Democratic House “backbenchers,” had over 200 submissions already. Now there are over 800, too many to read at once, although I scanned a couple of hundred. The site would ideally categorize them and encourage people to comment on the existing ones rather than repeat them. There were, for example, numerous suggestions to eliminate the state store system, to replace the property tax with a sales tax, to drug-test welfare recipients, to tax (or further tax) tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, and so on. Forcing the user to categorize the suggestion would also cut down on people who combined multiple unrelated suggestions in one comment.

I submitted two suggestions:

• Funnel punitive damage awards to fund state victim's compensation funds and/or other court expenses. Since these funds are not intended to compensate plaintiffs, a plaintiff should only be allowed to keep, say, 10% or $50,000, whichever is less. (This gives the plaintiff an incentive to seek the punitive damages in the first place.)

• Impose steep fines for litterers, at least $500 for a first offense. This may be better imposed by municipalities, in particular Philadelphia, but in any case there is no cost to anyone for simply putting your litter in a can, not on a street.