April 18, 2007
“Where do my income tax dollars go?”
I filed my taxes over the weekend. Fortunately, I didn’t have as many problems with TurboTax as the folks in this thread did.
I did find this interesting piece though: using data from this MSNBC piece, Consumerist created this chart:
If The US Government Were The Average Household, What Would Its Budget Be? - Consumerist
Probably revealing my age, I also recently learned this:
U.S. Treasury - FAQs: Deductions & Tax Liability
The deduction for personal interest, including interest on charge card purchase of consumer items, was phased out by the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Wow… I can’t believe that at one time, credit card interest was tax deductible. And that Congress and President Reagan actually passed a law to end it.
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3 Comments to ““Where do my income tax dollars go?””
April 18th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Man, talk about interesting, and probably a graph I’d like to see change. I mean, shouldn’t public schools and colleges have a much bigger chunk than they’ve got listed? Healthcare… well, it seems overly expensive to me, but I guess that’s healthcare. Still, for the price we seem to be paying, you’d think we’d have a better healthcare system.
April 19th, 2007 at 7:21 am
Interesting thing I learned on NPR–before WWII, a majority of Americans didn’t pay any income tax. In fact, the Treasury Department recruited Walt Disney to make a cartoon starring Donald Duck that propagated how it was a civic privilege to pay taxes and support our country (see http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/CartoonTaxes.html) At the height of WWII, income taxes for the uber wealthy rose as high as 94%.
If you think about it, must have been pretty hard to reliably collect taxes in the days before electronic record keeping.
April 19th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
The way I understand it, you get very different pie charts depending on which “budget” you are talking about.
This is supposedly the “federal discretionary budget”.
http://www.truemajority.org/csba/priorities.php
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