Where Your Tax Money Went
I posted about Third Way’s “Taxpayer Receipts” project back in October. Since Tax Day is fast approaching, it seemed like a good time to go back and see where the project stands. Third Way – moderate-progressive think tank, if you recall – built a calculator which, when you to plug in your 2010 Federal taxes paid, shows you a breakdown of where your money went. When I last checked, it was a policy paper and a good idea. Now, it’s operational:
The receipt is ordered by percentage of where your money goes, with Social Security (20.4%) and Defense (20.2%) claiming the lion’s share, and Medicare close on their heels.
Clicking on a major category shows you some sub-categories and breakdowns in the same family. For example, clicking “Arts and Culture” ($7.20 for the year for me) yields that I contributed something like $1.44 to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Economic Development Administration – under the “Trade and Economic Development” header – got $1.01 from me. The striking information from the receipt is really that $.537 of every $1.00 remitted via Federal taxes is going to pay for the first three items on the list.
So – take your Form 1040 and drop in the “Total Tax” number from Line 60. Then maybe we can have a reasonable conversation about where our money goes. Take “Foreign Aid” – a January 2011 Gallup Poll found that 59% of Americans think the US should cut foreign aid. Another poll (this one by CNN in mid-March 2011) found that respondents thought the US was spending about 10% of its annual budget on foreign aid. We actually spent… 0.6%. That’s the difference in an informed public with an easy-to-read receipt: closing the knowledge gap without making a value judgment about whether or not that percentage is appropriate or represents too little or too much, and showing us where to get the most “bang for our buck” when it comes to reducing item 6 – “Net interest payments” – the amount we spend to service our debts.
