Where do your tax dollars go?

I have written about understanding income taxes before, using the "tax receipt" idea from Third Wave. Here is another good example from the WSJ 11/6/10 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704506404575592900454547226.html?KEYWORDS=laura+saunders). As we discussed last Thursday, all of the expenditures below SS, Medicare/Medicaid, interest on debt, and the military (called "non-military discretionary spending) only account for 17% of spending. If you cancellled them all, you would barely cover 1/2 of this year's deficit.
This is a good place to note that there are 7 different ways that income is taxed at the federal level: income from work (to which 3 different tax schemes are applied: federal income tax, Social Security, and Medicare), income from interest, income from dividends, income from investments and then all of these combined under another tax scheme, the Alternate Minimum Tax.

An imaginative idea about taxation and the Federal budget

For many Americans, the amount they pay in taxes is larger than any purchase they make during the year, but studies show they know almost nothing about where that money goes to. This contributes to ridiculous beliefs, like the view that 20% of government spending goes to foreign aid, for example. An electorate unschooled in basic budget facts is a major obstacle to controlling the nation’s deficit, not to mention addressing a host of economic and social problems. We suggest that everyone who files a tax return receive a “taxpayer receipt.” This receipt would tell them to the penny what their taxes paid for based on the amount they paid in federal income taxes and FICA.


from this website: http://www.thirdway.org/publications/335