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Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

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Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#71

Post by mediaman »

julian37 wrote: post #50

I wonder if these numbers are made up or have any basis in reality. One item that caught my eye was spending on the DEA of only $3.14: Wikipedia puts yearly spending on law enforcement related to the War On Drugs at about $44 billion [1] and gross federal tax revenue for 2009 at about $2.1 trillion [2]. This works out to roughly 2% of tax revenue spent on the War On Drugs. For the $5,400 of federal income tax in the…

DEA's budget is much smaller than total spending on the "War On Drugs" (not sure how that number is calculated; spending against illegal drug manufacturing, distribution and consumption happens at many levels of law enforcement).

Their 2009 appropriations were $2.6bn.

http://www.justice.gov/dea/agency/staffing.htm

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#72

Post by xenophanes »

timr wrote: post #39
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan supported sending people statements of what was in their social security. His idea was that if people never saw what was in there, they'd never miss it when it was gone. I think this is a logical extension of that idea, and its great. I'd also like to see the flip side of the receipt contain a guess for how the same tax amount would break down the following year based on curre…

It's definitely a great idea, given that members of both major political parties are absolutely loathe to touch the biggest sources of government expenditure: old person benefits (social security + medicare), and the military. Medical services for the poor (medicaid) are comparatively minor, but you wouldn't know it, given how much emphasis the Republicans place on the question of the "welfare state". With greater pu…

Social security and medicare are "welfare" by any reasonable definition. So the welfare state is a big issue.

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#73

Post by Legion »

nhebb wrote: post #63
hugh3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment would have been much better without injecting your own political opinions on the matter via the parenthetical "as they should be".

Everyone should be critical of wars. I think there's a knee jerk reaction to label war critics as partisan, but questioning war really should be apolitical. I'm a veteran (go 10th Mountain!) and a Republican, and I'm critical of wars. I don't feel that we have a clear, achievable goal in Afghanistan, and I'm appalled at the complete apathy by the media and America public to the fact that we are at war, both taking an…

An important point. Also important: "critical" is not a synonym for "anti-".

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#75

Post by dkasper »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #66
dkasper wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your wish is my command: http://www.incometaxreceipt.com

You've got a misplaced decimal in your calculations somewhere, as your numbers add up to less than 10% of what I put in.

heh, I fixed it.

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#76

Post by julian37 »

mediaman wrote: post #71
julian37 wrote: post #50

I wonder if these numbers are made up or have any basis in reality. One item that caught my eye was spending on the DEA of only $3.14: Wikipedia puts yearly spending on law enforcement related to the War On Drugs at about $44 billion [1] and gross federal tax revenue for 2009 at about $2.1 trillion [2]. This works out to roughly 2% of tax revenue spent on the War On Drugs. For the $5,400 of federal income tax in the…

DEA's budget is much smaller than total spending on the "War On Drugs" (not sure how that number is calculated; spending against illegal drug manufacturing, distribution and consumption happens at many levels of law enforcement). Their 2009 appropriations were $2.6bn. http://www.justice.gov/dea/agency/staffing.htm

Makes sense, but assuming that the $44bn figure in the Wikipedia article is correct I'm still wondering where the remaining ~$97 dollars are hidden. In "Military Personnel" and "Health Care Research"? I guess it goes to show that even with a fairly detailed list of expense positions, you still don't really know where your tax dollars go.

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#77

Post by eli »

hugh3 wrote: post #10
brown9-2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: "selected items", if you click through to the PDF there is a footnote attached: >4 Budget calculations are based on budget allocations obtained from the Office of Management and Budget using historical tables from the FY2011 budget submission as well as the Congressional Budget Office website for such items as interest on the debt, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. My guess is that the real cause of "selec…

My guess is that the real cause of "selected items" is that the number of things paid for by your taxes are obviously much larger than could fit on a short list, and has a long tail. Well, of course that depends how you slice it. Break it down by department and it looks more like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_categor... The twenty-something listed departments account for 97% of the budget…

I don't have a citation handy, but there's actually a lot of spending that isn't explicitly in the budget.

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#78

Post by JohnAllen »

The denominator should be tax receipts, not federal spending. Foreign countries and our Federal Reserve actually made large contributions this past year (both do every year we have a budget deficit and every year the money supply increase- this is most every year for the past few decades). This is not to suggest that Americans won't eventually pay for all of this year's expenditures, we eventually will. In the case of the Fed, consider their new money printing and subsequent spending to be a tax of everyone that holds dollars at the time of the printing/spending.

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#79

Post by eli »

Aetius wrote: post #16
hugh3 wrote: post #2

Not a bad idea. But why does it say "selected items"? I haven't added the numbers up myself, but one of the comments says that the listed things add up to only sixty-something percent of the total. Where's the other money gone? One might almost think they're trying to make a political point with their careful selection of items (eg. "Combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan" somehow got to fifth place on the list wh…

This is, after all, NPR...no surprise the war was prominent as they have a decidedly progressive news team. I won't call NPR liberal, but certainly left of center, and very critical (as they should be) of the wars.

Do you have any data to back that up?

The empirical evidence shows that, for example, NPR is more likely to interview a conservative economist about a story than a liberal. I think they go out of their way to defer to right-of-center politicians because they are so afraid of the perception that they're liberal.

In short, I think you're wrong.

Re: Thanks For Paying Taxes. Here's A Receipt.

#80

Post by timr »

xenophanes wrote: post #72
timr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a great idea, given that members of both major political parties are absolutely loathe to touch the biggest sources of government expenditure: old person benefits (social security + medicare), and the military. Medical services for the poor (medicaid) are comparatively minor, but you wouldn't know it, given how much emphasis the Republicans place on the question of the "welfare state". With greater pu…

Social security and medicare are "welfare" by any reasonable definition. So the welfare state is a big issue.

You can define "welfare" however you like, but it doesn't change the reality that no politician -- on either side of the aisle -- is seriously proposing cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Old people comprise the base of both political parties.
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