Your personal tax receipt

Cool new calculator lets you enter in your 2010 income so you can see how your money is being spent. I used the default for two income family making $60-80K a year, but you can enter in exact numbers from your W2 if you prefer.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxreceipt

What I found is that about 26 percent of my taxes went to military spending - the highest percentage of total spending. Medicare and Medicaid were the next highest expenses. Surprisingly, a lot less of my money went to welfare, unemployment and food stamps than I thought. What's especially sad is how little money goes to education, R&D, or community development. The average taxpayer is spending 10 percent of their taxes for the current wars and only 2 percent on K-12 education.

It is amazing how little spending there really is at the Federal level for the kinds of government services that take up so much space in the political debate. Bill Maher has made the analogy that if taxes were like a TV dinner, it would be like fighting over the miniscule portions of peas and carrots while Defense sits there like a giant slab of meatloaf while Medicare/caid are like the huge pile of mashed potatoes.

Of course, that's *federal* tax dollars: most of the spending on things like schools comes from state tax dollars which are mostly property taxes and sales taxes.

CheezePavilion wrote:

It is amazing how little spending there really is at the Federal level for the kinds of government services that take up so much space in the political debate. Bill Maher has made the analogy that if taxes were like a TV dinner, it would be like fighting over the miniscule portions of peas and carrots while Defense sits there like a giant slab of meatloaf while Medicare/caid are like the huge pile of mashed potatoes.

Of course, that's *federal* tax dollars: most of the spending on things like schools comes from state tax dollars which are mostly property taxes and sales taxes.

LOL love the TV dinner analogy. Also good point that state/local taxes play a big role in funding services that people use the most in their everyday life (ie, cops and fire, schools, parks, etc). But look at how other countries spend a lot of their tax dollars on education and you'll see we're way behind at the national level.

jdzappa wrote:

LOL love the TV dinner analogy. Also good point that state/local taxes play a big role in funding services that people use the most in their everyday life (ie, cops and fire, schools, parks, etc). But look at how other countries spend a lot of their tax dollars on education and you'll see we're way behind at the national level.

Leaving aside the debate over whether we really *are* behind considering the differences between us and those other countries, from what I know there are few countries with such a strong divide between the state and the federal as America, so if we're not factoring in local property taxes I think we're looking at a misleading statistic.

Does anyone know if those numbers include the things like the emergency defense spending bill? I've been lead to believe that things like that are typically not included in the budget numbers given out, but its hard to tell here.

absurddoctor wrote:

Does anyone know if those numbers include the things like the emergency defense spending bill? I've been lead to believe that things like that are typically not included in the budget numbers given out, but its hard to tell here.

Good question and I wish I knew the answer. My first inclination would be no since that spending used to be "off the books."

It used to be but I remember Obama changing it so it's part of the general budget numbers back in his first year of office.

Except federal taxes don't really fund anything. They just keep inflation in check.