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Tax Wrapped 2025
Where did my taxes go?
81–90 of 231 posts
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#82This 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.
Except the US doesn’t have universal healthcare, and other nations do.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social Security almost entirely flows to beneficiaries, as do programs like SNAP, where overhead is around 6-7% (admittedly, fraud might be a good bit higher than that); likewise Medicare is one of the most efficient systems at getting money directly to medical providers (although fraud might be a problem there too, estimates range from 10%-25%).
Yup, Medicaid and SNAP are extremely efficient. Social Security is almost completely disbursement charges but those disbursements aren't means tested so even quite wealthy individuals receive them. Additionally you mentioned that Medicare gets money to medical providers but I suspect that was meant to mean medical insurance providers - rather than health care providers (like doctors) since the system is partially dir…
> Social Security is almost completely disbursement charges but those disbursements aren't means tested so even quite wealthy individuals receive them.
Only to those who paid into the system and far less than they personally could have earned on investing the same dollars.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#84I love how easy this kind of mini data visualization projects have become
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#85As 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…
Taxes do not fund spending. This is a foundational myth of neoliberalism, closely related to the "A national economy is run like a household" myth.
The alternative is Modern Monetary Theory, which states that the government and banking sector money creation fund spending, and governments cannot run out of currency.
Taxes control the money supply and mop up excess funds, which controls inflation.
Bonds set interest rates.
Spending is a strategic and political choice, not something limited by "the deficit" - which is literally just the difference between spending choices and taxation choices.
One very obvious tell is how Republicans make a lot of noise about the deficit and the debt, but always raise both when they're in office.
Always. Why? Because they spend government money lavishly on themselves and their patrons, and cut taxes for themselves and their patrons.
This doesn't "create jobs", it clogs up the system with sclerotic piles of cash that drive an extractive economy that sits on top of the productive economy most people live in.
This is very different economically to stability spending - welfare, healthcare, and such - and investment spending, such as direct funding of education and R&D.
In the MMT, the most significant drivers of inflation are corporate profiteering and supply shocks.
Like oil crises. For example.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#86As 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…
I would be happy if all the laws both at the state and federal level were under version control and we could see who added each line.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#87As 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…
I like your idea, and I wish that it could be practically implemented.
As with voting, implementing your idea would be subject to exploitation. For it to work, you would need a way of ensuring that each taxpayer/voter was authorized to vote, and voted only once. You would need to somehow prevent "harvesting" too.
Those who have an interest in exploiting the system would lobby for built-in weaknesses that they could exploit.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#88As 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…
It is interesting because in a roundabout way this is essentially asking what taxes are for in the first place. You will probably get some kind of “tyranny of the majority/rich”.
For example, if you have a country on the older side, most people will vote to heavily fund social security at the expense of education. As the demographics change, would be no mechanism to correct the issue. Demographics become destiny.
Similarly, taxes allow rich areas to prop up poor areas of the country. California subsidizes the majority of states for example.
Part of the genius of taxes as a technology is that it allows (forces) a large group of people to coordinate to solve problems that they wouldn’t have otherwise. In the ideal case, it allows smart, forward thinking people to solve collective issues.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US spends the most per capita[0] on healthcare in the world, all to receive a healthcare system that still requires lots of citizens to carry private insurance. I've never dug deep into why, but it sure is noteworthy. 0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
The private insurance expenditure is part of that per capita number. US healthcare isn't "A system", its a number of interrelated systems that have lots of expensive hand-offs. We also spend a ton on lifestyles diseases because no one walks and culturally we eat like shit on average.
The graph shows both public and private expenditure. If you only consider the public per-capita expenditure it's more than every other nation on the graphs public + private per-capita spending.
Re: Where did my taxes go?
#90More and more I find my politics drifting towards whoever will balance the budget and pay down the deficit. Since that party doesn’t exist I am politically homeless.
fun fact I discovered in this process: if the US just went back to 2019 spending (with 2025 tax revenue), there would be a $780B surplus.