The year I became the creative director for Jackson Memorial Hospital, our annual report featured the opening of our new, state-of-the-art trauma center, funded by a half-penny sales tax voted on by the citizens of Miami/Dade County.

I had a concept and a headline: If you don’t think a penny buys much these days, look at what a half-penny will buy. I wanted to find out how many departments, divisions, units, people touch a typical trauma patient. Then I wanted to put a representative from of each into a single photoshoot. My answer, from the cops who photographed the accident, to the discharge manager, was 52. My centerfold became a double centerfold (4 pages), requiring five separate group photos and sending the film to be composited in NYC, where the technology was available.

At Jackson, in 1992, every photo had to include the three major ethnic groups who live in Miami and an even gender split. It was known around campus. When I started to recruit my subjects, every manager asked me the same question: What do you need? In every instance, I said the same thing: Your best. I don’t care what age, gender, color, shift, or nationality. If you had to pick one person who embodies the best of what you do here every day, that is the person I want.

There were 53 people in the final photo, including the patient. There was a perfect rainbow of races, with an approximate 30/30/30 split. International representation came from Asia, North and South America, Europe, and Africa. It was an even split of gender. Without demanding any specific representation, I had gotten it all.

The answer was found not in the details, but in the aggregate.

What This Isn’t

This isn’t a debate about what the slices are or what each slice is actually responsible for, because that’s determined by the Feds and would be a different poll altogether.

Nope. I simply want to see what the US budget would look like if each tax payer could say where their money went. To that end, I am not collecting any data from you. I am not going to break this down by region, race, gender, level of education, kind of car you drive. I don’t care about that. I’m not trying to find differences, but commonalities.

What I do care about is finding out what the rest of America cares about. If everybody had a say, what would we, as a people, fund? Would we fund war or peace? Would we fund agriculture or infrastructure? (Oversimplifying again, the two are not mutually exclusive.)

On the other hand, don’t be a jerk. One vote per day per IP address. Thank you. Are you ready? Let’s cut the pie.