I’ve always known the breakdown in my head, but seeing the raw numbers by category was pretty eye opening - particularly how much I’m contributing per month to support something like say, aggressive wars in the middle east that are driving up my gas prices.
Where did my taxes go?
11–20 of 231 posts
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#12This makes it sort of obvious how large the US welfare state is.
Medicaid: 10%
"Safety Net": 7.1%
Social Security: 22.6%
Medicare: 14.2%
53.9% of the federal budget is spent on welfare. That seems roughly in line with most Western nations.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#13https://www.usaspending.gov/ is another great website for this stuff. I suggest using the Budget explorer. Here's the map by function (e.g. national defense, healthcare): https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#14As a thought experiment, it'd be interesting to imagine how things would play out if each taxpayer could adjust little sliders on each category to allocate where they personally would like their taxes to go.
Agencies could recommend funding levels, Congress could recommend an allocation and if a taxpayer didn't change it, that default would take effect. But if a taxpayer preferred, they could say, "no, I won't be funding DOD this year". Or space nerds might say "I'm sending 100% of my tax dollars to NASA!"
Of course no one would likely choose to do boring stuff like paying interest on debt. So we'd probably end up with incredibly well-funded national parks and cool space missions, and also a crippling recession due to defaulting on the national debt.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#15This makes it sort of obvious how large the US welfare state is. Medicaid: 10% "Safety Net": 7.1% Social Security: 22.6% Medicare: 14.2% 53.9% of the federal budget is spent on welfare. That seems roughly in line with most Western nations.
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Re: Where did my taxes go?
#16If the US had a credit score, I wonder what it would be?
AA+
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#17As a thought experiment, it'd be interesting to imagine how things would play out if each taxpayer could adjust little sliders on each category to allocate where they personally would like their taxes to go. Agencies could recommend funding levels, Congress could recommend an allocation and if a taxpayer didn't change it, that default would take effect. But if a taxpayer preferred, they could say, "no, I won't be fun…
If the sliders applied only to discretionary spending, it might work.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#18If the US had a credit score, I wonder what it would be?
They're rated AA+/AA- depending on whom. The downgrades to the US's credit rating were big news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_governme...
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#19I would be more likely to share this w others if the domain name didn't have an f-bomb in it. It doesn't bother me that much, but I really don't want to share it in certain circles...
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#20This makes it sort of obvious how large the US welfare state is. Medicaid: 10% "Safety Net": 7.1% Social Security: 22.6% Medicare: 14.2% 53.9% of the federal budget is spent on welfare. That seems roughly in line with most Western nations.
In line on price, but not on value.
If anything this speaks to the cost of welfare in America.
The corollary is that many suggestions to reduce welfare spending would lead to even less actual welfare being delivered, without addressing systemic cost problems.