The folks at ThirdWay.org have come up with a sales receipt visualization of federal government spending:
- for a taxpayer earning the median income
- for taxpayers earning $200,000 (working) and $100,000 (retired)
I wonder if we checked out of the mall with a receipt like this how we would feel about the value received!
[Of course, this misses state income tax, state sales tax, local property tax, and other state and local taxes, so it doesn’t tell us where about half of our total tax dollars are going. I think the visualization also misses federal taxes on air transportation, fuel, imports, etc.]
It is probably a little misleading to break down Defense spending into various categories such as labor, acquisition, retirement, and operations and to not do so for other departments/categories. If you combine all of the DOD related costs it quickly jumps to the very top of the list.
and if the 200k person is self-employed, he can expect self-employment tax to add about 8k to the damage
Tom: I noticed that also. Maybe the Third Way folks thought that if they showed us the total military spending we would get so depressed that we wouldn’t keep reading the rest of the receipt!