By the way, the 1040 instructions have a pie chart like this (ref https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf, page 122). Not that most people do taxes themselves, or have a reason to read to page 122 of instructions for a single form. But still it's there and perhaps a nice gesture by the IRS.
Breaking it out into pie charts etc like this can be really helpful. In my view the real kicker with taxes is the opaqueness. Kinda like a meal card versus paying for every meal, or like using a credit card versus paying with cash, it's hard for humans to really grasp what's going on unless they're involved.
Of course it would be impractical to pay taxes separately to every waiting hand in government bureaucracy. But on the other hand maybe the number one goal shouldn't be ease of use, either. Maybe a little friction when paying for public services could be a good thing for citizens who are interested in a healthy country - my opinion.
> Interest per Second - General - The U.S. pays $31,688/second in debt interest — $1,901,285 every minute. Your share of that: $3893.33 [plugged in "normal" amount], gone before it bought anything.
...I thought I was already sufficiently terrified by the debt numbers...
Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway.
It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.
>It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit.
This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.
As 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.
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.
On principle collective issues can be solved, effectively many pay over 50% taxes (accounting for all taxes) yet not all issues are solved.
One could deduct taxes aren't solving collective issues, otherwise there wouldn't be any given The U.S is the biggest economy in the world yet millions can't even effort decent Healthcare.
Organizations don't work well when their budget can change dramatically from one year to the next. There's no ability to take on long-term plans when another, popular department takes 50% of your budget, or someone in your PR department makes a gaffe. Long-term employees get laid off and won't return in a few years when your budget goes back up.
I like this idea, but limit it to $1000. Everything in government is funded, but each person can direct $1000 to general fund, a specific department, an initiative, or a registered non-profit.
I think a ranking system might be easier. People are good at ranking priorities.
The idea breaks down for the rich who are being taxed the most, because nobody wants them to have any say.
You could maybe do it for some percentage of taxes. Perhaps only for things that are desirable but not necessities (maybe Symphonies, science, high arts funding, sports funding, humanities education, BBC, other things people think they shouldn't pay for).
Although that would make people ask for a slider to reduce their taxes (to zero, thank you).
I always think as an individual I would like this. But at scale I worry it would incentivize each department to advertise themselves to the public, which seems to me like a waste of funds.
I already dislike the reelection cycle (politicians incentivized to always be fundraising) and would hate to see that happen per department.
It would probably be wasteful initially but I doubt it would be more wasteful than bad policy that doesn't actually prioritize what the electorate wants.
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.
This line of reasoning seems to be without any deeper thought.
If taxpayers should have the freedom to decide how the money that is taken from them is spent, then why shouldn't they have the freedom to decide how much money they pay?
If taxes aren't collected because the ends justify the means, then the only other option is that they are collected to punish the taxpayers.
The former can be morally justifiable, but how do you justify the latter?
"crippling recession due to defaulting" - we will just borrow more as usual. Not like our taxes are enough to fund the nation in any year (war or no war).
I would guess that's a poor thought experiment, because most of us - myself included - don't have a good grasp of what various things cost to make work. And then when you look at the relative points on the sliders you think "Oh, but X is much more critical than Y, surely I can't spend so little on it relative to my spending on Y".
Not to mention the complex semantics and effects of debt in sovereign finance, and actions like increasing or decreasing the money supply etc.
I would guess that we don't know because we don't interact with it at all and this would have us interact with it. No doubt that few people would really study very hard or that this would suddenly make everyone experts, but I suppose having to deal with it a tiny bit might lead to a tiny sense of the mechanics or scale. Like when you have to sit through the airplane safety talk, my guess is most people are still just going to thrash around over seats in an emergency of maybe ask each other what to do, but I guess people now know they're supposed to wear their seatbelts or that there's a mask in the ceiling? And you also probably do get a few more citizen experts than you had before.
Still, yeah, as an experiment it doesn't seem likely to work. There is probably something to putting people a little closer to the action though.
You'd also have some very large but currently unknowable number of people underfunding Medicare and Social Security but still expecting to be able to draw out of it when they're older and demanding they be allowed to do so when they're seniors.
I live in a place with basically zero property taxes (except a pittance for the school). No public roads, no fire, almost no police, no parks, no public utilities.
It's absolutely glorious. I can buy exactly what I need. My monthly utility bills are way lower than anywhere else I've lived.
I cannot believe the populace has been duped into thinking so much of what we fund so direly must be done publicly that armed tax agents need to drag them to prison if they refuse to fund it that way. It is important to remember that everything that is taxed, the underlying method that will be used to enforce that is violence, and very carefully limiting that employ of mass violence.
Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right? We are living in your sliders world.
I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.
>Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right?
I'd say we spend a lot on things a few people who can maintain/expand power see ROI for power on. Sometimes that's things, sometimes that's just cash for voters and future voters.
The sliders world is more about consent via revenues of the governed, rather than the tax crop they really are.
To some extent? But the sliders would probably be even more extreme. If you are 70 years old you’ll probably vote to put everything on Uncle Sam’s credit card and let younger generations deal with it after you’re dead.
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.
Unfortunately, much of that gets dispersed into an unfathomably complex web of private and profit-seeking interests, with much less actually going to individual beneficiaries.
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 direct payments but mostly runs through intermediary privatized companies and, of extreme note here, is that Medicare is famously barred from cost negotiations so while our Canadian healthcare system can talk to a pharma manufacturer and tell them "The price for this drug is unreasonable, we won't cover it unless it's cost competitive to biosimilars" Medicare just needs to roll over and accept whatever made up numbers it's given.
The benefits that are intended to go exclusively to the impoverished though, those are extremely means-tested and often have work requirements or other hoops to jump through.
> 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.
Yeah, one of the problems I have with taxes is that if I pay $100 into taxes I don’t get $100 of value back. Everyone should get at least as much as they put in back. Also, some other people should get more back. But we shouldn’t spend more than we make as a government.
It's quite true. Take Medicaid grants to states for example, which then goes out to 50 different systems of disbursement to private entities. Enrollees on plans are often done so through private insurers, many hospitals are run as for-profit including being owned by PE groups, etc.
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.
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.
> We also spend a ton on lifestyles diseases because no one walks and culturally we eat like shit on average.
And there's a pretty straight line between that and government subsidies for sugar and processed foods in general, not to mention car-based infrastructure, although the latter doesn't stop other countries from not having crippling obesity rates.
And acknowledging the very obvious instances of regulatory capture that directly harm quality of life is political suicide for anyone with even the smallest amount of access to power.
It’s hard getting normies to admit that if soft drinks weren’t so heavily subsidized by the government at every step of manufacture and distribution, there would be less overall obesity.
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.
If clinics and hospitals do not bill 1k dollars each visit, 100k+ for a simple surgery, and pharmacy does not sell medicine 10x the price, US gov't do not need that much allocation for healthcare.
They only bill that much because they need the average amount of money collected for a procedure to pencil.
They get that cash price amount from a tiny amount of people, 70% of that price from private insurers, 30-60% from Medicare, less from Medicaid. Even then, they have to basically litigate the bills through private insurance appeals.
If they had one payer which had a single reimbursement rate, they wouldn't have to do these shenanigans.
Given that reality, I wonder why it is that spending in this category seems to be so much less effective in the US relative to other nations? Why is the US #22 in general quality of life [1], and the bottom of many rankings of health system performance [2]?
Speaking as a Canadian, I wonder if at least part of it is the attitude that investments in these areas are "welfare" and not simply a part of the portfolio of essential services that are delivered by the state to citizens?
It may just be my cynicism talking, but it seems that it comes down to the power of lobbyists. In the US, the healthcare companies control the government. Elsewhere, the government controls the healthcare companies.
The media narrative is a factor too. Like I have extended family, friends, and work colleagues in the US, many of whom are wealthy and well-traveled and even a lot of them will still loudly assert obviously disprovable untruths like "well at least we don't die in waiting rooms like in Canada" or "at least we don't have death panels deciding who gets to have life-saving treatment" or worst of all "ehh I mean I have good insurance, and outcomes are much better here for top-5%ers, so I don't really care about the rest of the system." All while decades of TV hospital dramas depict a well-oiled medical system delivering effective and efficient care to people with nary a whisper about how it's getting paid for.
It's got to be desperately frustrating trying to fight this kind of thinking when you've got whole communities who have never even thought to question it.
My main hope at this point is with bottom-up type efforts. Let Mamdani show people that an effective city government can fill potholes and operate a few at-cost supermarkets. Let that be the start of citizens expecting more than chainsaw-waving and twitter meltdowns for their tax dollars.
Playing devil's advocate - the measure of success of welfare isn't in the budget spent on it but public outcomes. That said, it is true more taxes or expenditure aren't the panacea that the left might think it is.
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.
The problem is that our public health care system could cover the entire country at no additional cost…if our health care spending per capita was inline with other nations with better health outcomes.
The distribution itself does not tell you much; you have to normalize by the share of GDP (or some other measure of production/activity) that the federal budget constitutes.
Also, as other commenters mention, the specifics of how money is disbursed or spent, matters. If, say, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to massively over-charge, than the same level of care would mean a higher level of spending than in other world states.
One of the most generous welfare states with one of the best safety nets. I' not really aware of any place better. Maybe one of the small countries like Lichtenstein.
I feel like legislation that resulted in every taxpayer getting an itemized receipt like this would be hugely popular and a massive PR win for the representatives that sponsored it.
I can only conclude that the reason it hasn't been done is because they don't actually want you to know.
I can’t help wondering about the categorization. For example, we spend more on “agricultural subsidies” than “NASA & space” or “EPA & environment”, but for some reason the former gets hidden under the “all other” category while the latter two get their own distinct categories. The author might not have a political motivation for those choices, but it’s the kind of choice that will likely influence the political conclusions the reader will make from the data.
The DoD was named such by the act of Congress that established it. The President does not have the authority to rename it, no matter how much he pouts about it.
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.
I really wish we would get away from this line of thinking. For state and local governments, yes, your taxes are put into accounts and are then spent according to the budget.
For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.
> The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced.
Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation.
The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy
I 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...
Hey Wayne, I bought wheretheheckdidmytaxesgo.com and will make it live after work today. Sorry about the profanity! It’s just how I felt after seeing the stats firsthand :)
Somewhat off topic, but I've always wanted to know _who_ gets my tax dollars more than what they were spent on. For example, a middle class salary to someone building bombs in Ohio is different than a wealthy investor who owns shares in some educational company that provides standardized tests to local public schools.
And also completely meaningless as a credit rating in the context of creditworthiness specifically means the ability to repay. And they can always print dollar bills to do so.
Now whether that $1 in 20 years will buy anything is an entirely different story.
Now consider that the Defense budget is ~$1 trillion and the Department of Defense has never passed an audit [1] and the administration is seeking $1.5 trillion next year [2].
This is great. I'd also recommend Covid money tracker. US printed nearly $12 trillion in response to Covid, something like 25% increase in money supply. And it is my contention that this has driven inflation (both asset - think meme stocks, rise in crypto etc - as well general levels that started to appear by 2022)
It has, as has similar efforts worldwide which also saw similar or worse levels of inflation. We were dealt a shit hand and the thinking was it's less pain overall compared to the alternative.
That said, the amount of fraud that was perpetuated here without any follow-through on enforcement is ... extremely not good.
Most of the fraud was the business loans, that they then forgave. That structure innately gave them the opportunity to take their time investigating them, after the benefit was already produced. They just chose not to.
It's way too high, but it's not by far the largest. It's barely higher than national defense and not that much higher than Medicaid/health. And it's only the highest because of the artificial split between income taxes and payroll taxes, where this page only considers income taxes. If you look at all federal spending, Social Security is the largest, then Medicare, then interest comes in at #3.
You have clearly never met fresh-out-of-basic or back-from-deployment sailors, then.
They build used car dealerships and strip clubs within walking distance of bases. Sailors blow thousands in an evening at the club, and then drive home in $75k vehicles purchased at predatory interest rates.
Despite significant, potentially life-changing enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses, housing stipends and more - many (or most) enlistees leave the service in debt or near penniless.
Love it - great application of publicly-available data. Also ref https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420307 US govt provided public debt resources.
By the way, the 1040 instructions have a pie chart like this (ref https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf, page 122). Not that most people do taxes themselves, or have a reason to read to page 122 of instructions for a single form. But still it's there and perhaps a nice gesture by the IRS.
Breaking it out into pie charts etc like this can be really helpful. In my view the real kicker with taxes is the opaqueness. Kinda like a meal card versus paying for every meal, or like using a credit card versus paying with cash, it's hard for humans to really grasp what's going on unless they're involved.
Of course it would be impractical to pay taxes separately to every waiting hand in government bureaucracy. But on the other hand maybe the number one goal shouldn't be ease of use, either. Maybe a little friction when paying for public services could be a good thing for citizens who are interested in a healthy country - my opinion.
> Interest per Second - General - The U.S. pays $31,688/second in debt interest — $1,901,285 every minute. Your share of that: $3893.33 [plugged in "normal" amount], gone before it bought anything.
...I thought I was already sufficiently terrified by the debt numbers...
Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway.
It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
>It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit.
This feels like a strawman. I can't recall ever hearing someone advocate for raising taxes and not changing a single other thing about the government. These ideas are all interconnected and someone advocating for increased taxes very likely has ideas about how spending should change too.
I think many Americans do not realize how much is spent on debt interest payments, which are a tidy source of income for rich people.
Is the amount proportional to the per capita income of the respective countries?
If you do tax revenue as % of GDP, you get the US falling at about 25%, with the OECD average sitting around 35%.
> When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year
Which is why these calculators should tell people who pay less than $32K that they are getting supported by the 5% who pay most of the taxes...
As 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.
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.
On principle collective issues can be solved, effectively many pay over 50% taxes (accounting for all taxes) yet not all issues are solved.
One could deduct taxes aren't solving collective issues, otherwise there wouldn't be any given The U.S is the biggest economy in the world yet millions can't even effort decent Healthcare.
Organizations don't work well when their budget can change dramatically from one year to the next. There's no ability to take on long-term plans when another, popular department takes 50% of your budget, or someone in your PR department makes a gaffe. Long-term employees get laid off and won't return in a few years when your budget goes back up.
Could have the slider pull the budget in that direction over the course of 5-10 years, instead of having it reflected immediately in the next year.
I like this idea, but limit it to $1000. Everything in government is funded, but each person can direct $1000 to general fund, a specific department, an initiative, or a registered non-profit.
I think a ranking system might be easier. People are good at ranking priorities.
The idea breaks down for the rich who are being taxed the most, because nobody wants them to have any say.
You could maybe do it for some percentage of taxes. Perhaps only for things that are desirable but not necessities (maybe Symphonies, science, high arts funding, sports funding, humanities education, BBC, other things people think they shouldn't pay for).
Although that would make people ask for a slider to reduce their taxes (to zero, thank you).
I always think as an individual I would like this. But at scale I worry it would incentivize each department to advertise themselves to the public, which seems to me like a waste of funds. I already dislike the reelection cycle (politicians incentivized to always be fundraising) and would hate to see that happen per department.
Whatever hypothetical law allowed individual citizens to allocate funds could also ban departments from advertising or misrepresenting what they do.
Thank gosh we didn't just have a huge scandal where DHS secretary Kristi Noem spent 220 million on advertising.
Well since it’s a hypothetical, we can also stipulate that laws are enforced.
Does PBS still do telethons like in days of old?
It would probably be wasteful initially but I doubt it would be more wasteful than bad policy that doesn't actually prioritize what the electorate wants.
Sure. I'd set all mine to zero, and keep the money.
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.
This line of reasoning seems to be without any deeper thought.
If taxpayers should have the freedom to decide how the money that is taken from them is spent, then why shouldn't they have the freedom to decide how much money they pay?
If taxes aren't collected because the ends justify the means, then the only other option is that they are collected to punish the taxpayers.
The former can be morally justifiable, but how do you justify the latter?
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.
If the sliders applied only to discretionary spending, it might work.
"crippling recession due to defaulting" - we will just borrow more as usual. Not like our taxes are enough to fund the nation in any year (war or no war).
Eventually the lenders will stop lending. That's what leads to the defaulting scenario in the first place.
I would guess that's a poor thought experiment, because most of us - myself included - don't have a good grasp of what various things cost to make work. And then when you look at the relative points on the sliders you think "Oh, but X is much more critical than Y, surely I can't spend so little on it relative to my spending on Y".
Not to mention the complex semantics and effects of debt in sovereign finance, and actions like increasing or decreasing the money supply etc.
I would guess that we don't know because we don't interact with it at all and this would have us interact with it. No doubt that few people would really study very hard or that this would suddenly make everyone experts, but I suppose having to deal with it a tiny bit might lead to a tiny sense of the mechanics or scale. Like when you have to sit through the airplane safety talk, my guess is most people are still just going to thrash around over seats in an emergency of maybe ask each other what to do, but I guess people now know they're supposed to wear their seatbelts or that there's a mask in the ceiling? And you also probably do get a few more citizen experts than you had before.
Still, yeah, as an experiment it doesn't seem likely to work. There is probably something to putting people a little closer to the action though.
You'd also have some very large but currently unknowable number of people underfunding Medicare and Social Security but still expecting to be able to draw out of it when they're older and demanding they be allowed to do so when they're seniors.
I live in a place with basically zero property taxes (except a pittance for the school). No public roads, no fire, almost no police, no parks, no public utilities.
It's absolutely glorious. I can buy exactly what I need. My monthly utility bills are way lower than anywhere else I've lived.
I cannot believe the populace has been duped into thinking so much of what we fund so direly must be done publicly that armed tax agents need to drag them to prison if they refuse to fund it that way. It is important to remember that everything that is taxed, the underlying method that will be used to enforce that is violence, and very carefully limiting that employ of mass violence.
> no fire
Trying to think of a place where there is no chance of fire and all I’m coming up with is the moon
Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right? We are living in your sliders world.
I hate these sorts of websites because they have a very intellectual starch to them but are very superficial. I also hate this frame of mind that's like, "nobody would choose to do boring stuff." People aren't stupid. I hate this "voters are stupid" frame of mind. It's unelectable, and it's always said by people who complain about political problems because they misunderstand and think that political problems are math problems. Like that all we need are more sliders. In this specific case, people love paying mortgages, they instantly understand the math of interest rates, and many many people are strongly incentivized to help people understand the magic of mortgages: that you get to both live in the thing you buy, which is useful, and that because you're living in it, people are willing to loan you 10x more than your income to buy it, a kind of leverage that isn't available anywhere else but people who will cut your fingers off if you don't pay them. We are living in your sliders world.
>Look, we spend a lot on things people want, right?
I'd say we spend a lot on things a few people who can maintain/expand power see ROI for power on. Sometimes that's things, sometimes that's just cash for voters and future voters.
The sliders world is more about consent via revenues of the governed, rather than the tax crop they really are.
> We are living in your sliders world
To some extent? But the sliders would probably be even more extreme. If you are 70 years old you’ll probably vote to put everything on Uncle Sam’s credit card and let younger generations deal with it after you’re dead.
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.
This 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.
Unfortunately, much of that gets dispersed into an unfathomably complex web of private and profit-seeking interests, with much less actually going to individual beneficiaries.
Not sure if this is comforting or distressing, but it's the same in all welfare states.
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 direct payments but mostly runs through intermediary privatized companies and, of extreme note here, is that Medicare is famously barred from cost negotiations so while our Canadian healthcare system can talk to a pharma manufacturer and tell them "The price for this drug is unreasonable, we won't cover it unless it's cost competitive to biosimilars" Medicare just needs to roll over and accept whatever made up numbers it's given.
The benefits that are intended to go exclusively to the impoverished though, those are extremely means-tested and often have work requirements or other hoops to jump through.
> 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.
Yeah, one of the problems I have with taxes is that if I pay $100 into taxes I don’t get $100 of value back. Everyone should get at least as much as they put in back. Also, some other people should get more back. But we shouldn’t spend more than we make as a government.
A lot just gets sucked up by 3rd parties of all stripes. Only ~20% of hospitals are for profit institutions for example.
Non-profit doesn't mean money-hating, though
My daughter’s classmate’s father is a head of a non-profit hospital.
They have a 6k sqft house with a basketball court, pool and a pool house in the prime location in West Los Angeles.
They had to join two lots to build to their liking.
We call that "pulling an Altman" these days.
I don’t think that’s true. US government services generally have very low overhead.
It's quite true. Take Medicaid grants to states for example, which then goes out to 50 different systems of disbursement to private entities. Enrollees on plans are often done so through private insurers, many hospitals are run as for-profit including being owned by PE groups, etc.
And the intermediaries? And admin?
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.
> We also spend a ton on lifestyles diseases because no one walks and culturally we eat like shit on average.
And there's a pretty straight line between that and government subsidies for sugar and processed foods in general, not to mention car-based infrastructure, although the latter doesn't stop other countries from not having crippling obesity rates.
And acknowledging the very obvious instances of regulatory capture that directly harm quality of life is political suicide for anyone with even the smallest amount of access to power.
It’s hard getting normies to admit that if soft drinks weren’t so heavily subsidized by the government at every step of manufacture and distribution, there would be less overall obesity.
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.
> I've never dug deep into why
The wealthy people that run insurance companies bribe our politicians to keep it that way.
If clinics and hospitals do not bill 1k dollars each visit, 100k+ for a simple surgery, and pharmacy does not sell medicine 10x the price, US gov't do not need that much allocation for healthcare.
They only bill that much because they need the average amount of money collected for a procedure to pencil.
They get that cash price amount from a tiny amount of people, 70% of that price from private insurers, 30-60% from Medicare, less from Medicaid. Even then, they have to basically litigate the bills through private insurance appeals.
If they had one payer which had a single reimbursement rate, they wouldn't have to do these shenanigans.
Given that reality, I wonder why it is that spending in this category seems to be so much less effective in the US relative to other nations? Why is the US #22 in general quality of life [1], and the bottom of many rankings of health system performance [2]?
Speaking as a Canadian, I wonder if at least part of it is the attitude that investments in these areas are "welfare" and not simply a part of the portfolio of essential services that are delivered by the state to citizens?
[1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...
[2]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
It may just be my cynicism talking, but it seems that it comes down to the power of lobbyists. In the US, the healthcare companies control the government. Elsewhere, the government controls the healthcare companies.
The media narrative is a factor too. Like I have extended family, friends, and work colleagues in the US, many of whom are wealthy and well-traveled and even a lot of them will still loudly assert obviously disprovable untruths like "well at least we don't die in waiting rooms like in Canada" or "at least we don't have death panels deciding who gets to have life-saving treatment" or worst of all "ehh I mean I have good insurance, and outcomes are much better here for top-5%ers, so I don't really care about the rest of the system." All while decades of TV hospital dramas depict a well-oiled medical system delivering effective and efficient care to people with nary a whisper about how it's getting paid for.
It's got to be desperately frustrating trying to fight this kind of thinking when you've got whole communities who have never even thought to question it.
My main hope at this point is with bottom-up type efforts. Let Mamdani show people that an effective city government can fill potholes and operate a few at-cost supermarkets. Let that be the start of citizens expecting more than chainsaw-waving and twitter meltdowns for their tax dollars.
Playing devil's advocate - the measure of success of welfare isn't in the budget spent on it but public outcomes. That said, it is true more taxes or expenditure aren't the panacea that the left might think it is.
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.
That is the sad part, your money is wasted. You guys pay roughly as much in welfare, but get a tenth of it back.
The people paid for that welfare for themselves. Everything that helps people is a scare word. They’re too entitled to welfare!
What would you rather have the government spend it's money on if not on the wellbeing/welfare of its citizens?
Yet, people still meme how unsupportive the US is to its people.
The reality is the US operates the world's largest social services apparatus, including the world's largest public healthcare system.
Both can be true. US spends a ton but people feel the pain because the money is spent poorly
The problem is that our public health care system could cover the entire country at no additional cost…if our health care spending per capita was inline with other nations with better health outcomes.
Except the US doesn’t have universal healthcare, and other nations do.
The distribution itself does not tell you much; you have to normalize by the share of GDP (or some other measure of production/activity) that the federal budget constitutes.
Also, as other commenters mention, the specifics of how money is disbursed or spent, matters. If, say, pharmaceutical companies are allowed to massively over-charge, than the same level of care would mean a higher level of spending than in other world states.
A big chunk of the "defense" budget is also healthcare and benefits for veterans.
Yes, if it was actually spent on welfare and not lost as friction in a system of cronies.
One of the most generous welfare states with one of the best safety nets. I' not really aware of any place better. Maybe one of the small countries like Lichtenstein.
I feel like legislation that resulted in every taxpayer getting an itemized receipt like this would be hugely popular and a massive PR win for the representatives that sponsored it.
I can only conclude that the reason it hasn't been done is because they don't actually want you to know.
I can’t help wondering about the categorization. For example, we spend more on “agricultural subsidies” than “NASA & space” or “EPA & environment”, but for some reason the former gets hidden under the “all other” category while the latter two get their own distinct categories. The author might not have a political motivation for those choices, but it’s the kind of choice that will likely influence the political conclusions the reader will make from the data.
Shouldn’t the “defense” line item be called “war” now since the department has been renamed? It’s more accurate anyways.
The DoD was named such by the act of Congress that established it. The President does not have the authority to rename it, no matter how much he pouts about it.
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.
The unbundling of "Veterans Benefits" from "National Defense" is such an American thing, as though the former would exist without the latter.
"As though the latter...without the former."
Insurance company with an army primarily. But now with an expensive credit card bill.
I really wish we would get away from this line of thinking. For state and local governments, yes, your taxes are put into accounts and are then spent according to the budget.
For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.
The treasury has an account at the FED called TGA[0] which is funded by tax payments and proceeds from new Treasuries issuance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_General_Account
> The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced.
Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation.
The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy
More 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.
Neither party may be good on this issue, but one is certainly worse than the other[1].
[1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/INTERAC...
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.
Just fixing federal budget growth to a figure slightly less than GDP growth would do the trick eventually. But we just can't bring ourselves to do it.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
Why would anyone listen to the tax crop? Farmers don't listen to the cows.
I 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...
Hey Wayne, I bought wheretheheckdidmytaxesgo.com and will make it live after work today. Sorry about the profanity! It’s just how I felt after seeing the stats firsthand :)
On HN we don't much care about profanity per se, so there's no need to bowdlerize a la "the fuck" -> "the heck".
In this case, though, the best option is probably just to take out the expletive.
Welfare, defense, interest on debt. That’s it.
I love how easy this kind of mini data visualization projects have become
Somewhat off topic, but I've always wanted to know _who_ gets my tax dollars more than what they were spent on. For example, a middle class salary to someone building bombs in Ohio is different than a wealthy investor who owns shares in some educational company that provides standardized tests to local public schools.
https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/agency
Click down into a federal account and then change the drop down over the chart to "Recipient".
If 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...
And also completely meaningless as a credit rating in the context of creditworthiness specifically means the ability to repay. And they can always print dollar bills to do so.
Now whether that $1 in 20 years will buy anything is an entirely different story.
This exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_ra... USA is #18, below Taiwan and Above Qatar. Australia is #1.
Australia's credit rating is something of a matter of national pride.
Well never missed a payment in its lifetime might make it pretty high even with high debt income ratio
It does.
Standard & Poor's: AA+
Moody's: Aa1
It does:
S&P: "AA+ with stable outlook"
Moody's: "Aa1 stable"
DBRS: "AAA stable"
In terms of FICO scores this would be ~820 or so. The US won't have any problem any time soon getting some more private sector money.
Which is just the tiniest bit worse than Germany, but not much. And it's a lot higher than France.
AA+
Now consider that the Defense budget is ~$1 trillion and the Department of Defense has never passed an audit [1] and the administration is seeking $1.5 trillion next year [2].
[1]: https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/why-cant-...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5772701/trump-budget-de...
This is great. I'd also recommend Covid money tracker. US printed nearly $12 trillion in response to Covid, something like 25% increase in money supply. And it is my contention that this has driven inflation (both asset - think meme stocks, rise in crypto etc - as well general levels that started to appear by 2022)
https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/
It has, as has similar efforts worldwide which also saw similar or worse levels of inflation. We were dealt a shit hand and the thinking was it's less pain overall compared to the alternative.
That said, the amount of fraud that was perpetuated here without any follow-through on enforcement is ... extremely not good.
I think lack of enforcement was a deliberate decision to get the money out faster.
If each claim was investigated closely before paying out, it may have resulted in higher unemployment and lower economic output.
Most of the fraud was the business loans, that they then forgave. That structure innately gave them the opportunity to take their time investigating them, after the benefit was already produced. They just chose not to.
I look forward to a website that tells me who to vote for based on my occupation, socioeconomic status, and who will be the most benefit to me
That will be the true death knell of democracy
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
In the UK, HMRC provides this breakdown itself to every taxpayer in their online portal.
Since we renamed DOD to DOW, should the Defense budget be renamed too?
Related:
Tax Wrapped 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755604
Interest on the national debt is by far the largest share. Both political parties spend like drunken sailors.
It's way too high, but it's not by far the largest. It's barely higher than national defense and not that much higher than Medicaid/health. And it's only the highest because of the artificial split between income taxes and payroll taxes, where this page only considers income taxes. If you look at all federal spending, Social Security is the largest, then Medicare, then interest comes in at #3.
Drunken sailors don't spent more than they earn, for the most part.
You have clearly never met fresh-out-of-basic or back-from-deployment sailors, then.
They build used car dealerships and strip clubs within walking distance of bases. Sailors blow thousands in an evening at the club, and then drive home in $75k vehicles purchased at predatory interest rates.
Despite significant, potentially life-changing enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses, housing stipends and more - many (or most) enlistees leave the service in debt or near penniless.
I can understand why zero isn't a valid entry, but it should be. That is an entirely plausible result for a federal income tax calculation.
Debt. Defense. Dole.
https://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
If only I could elect to send 4000 to NASA and not to enable israel's genocide in the middle east.
How many people are murdered per dollar spent on "defense"?
Unfortunately I could easily see this being twisted into a mandate to murder more
In 2025, approximately $850 million per person who died.
A lot less than those born from the economic prosperity brought from open and protected sea lanes