I do want to start by pointing out that there are several complaints about this donation project that I don't agree with. As nice as it is to play games with math showing how long it will take to reach their goal or predict that the rate of donations will drop, it's probably not that easy to make guesses about the rate of donations. And while it's tempting to point out how much else we could get other than political stunts with this money, the average donation is right around $50, and all of us are probably guilty at one point or another of using sums like that in a less than ideal fashion.
What I do want to ask is: do we really want our government to work this way?
The one detail I will use from the math problem I discounted above is that even if the donation rate doubles, it would take months to reach the goal - and years to get the actual amount we'd need for the wall. Even if we decide that's okay for this project, there are a number of things our government needs a bit more urgently than that. We did, after all, learn all the way back before we even had a Constitution that a federal government that can only ask for money can't even pay its debts, much less do anything else.
And making a habit of this also means tying our government's ability to pay for things to the wealth level of the portion of society that favors a particular project or the strength of the viral marketing campaign they can come up with. Both of those possibilities seem like they could make our country very undemocratic if they end badly.
Even if we decide we'll only do it for some limited projects, that still offers an option for people to do end runs around the democratic process by offering conditional donations. There are ways to avoid that, but we'd need to be careful about how we set it up. Otherwise, we'd see the government forced to choose between accepting money for projects that the people don't want or turning down money that it generally needs more of.
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