Curious Where Our Taxes Go
BOSTON (CBS) -- The federal government helps itself to a big chunk of your paycheck every week; the taxes it takes out run the government.
But where, exactly, do your taxes go?
Katie from Gardner Declared her Curiosity writing, "Why our country can give out billions to help other countries, but we can't even take care of the people living in our own backyard."
That's a question tackled by D.C.-based think-tank Third Way. It's a left-leaning type of place, but analysts on the right and the left say Third Way has done a good job, offering a useful breakdown of where our federal tax dollars go.
Their breakdown isn't perfect, it omits a lot of technicalities that bog down the system, but it does give us a good idea of what the Feds buy with our money.
To make sense of the huge numbers, Third Way imagines a typical family of two parents and two kids, with an annual income of $200,000. Not an average salary; but the percentages hold true anyway.
The number one expenditure: Social Security. It eats up 19.2 percent of the average family's tax bill. Close behind are Medicare at 12 percent and Medicaid at 7.1 percent.
That's almost 40 percent of every tax dollar right in the top three.
Interest on the national debt eats up 5.3 percent. Running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan account for another 4.1 percent.
Slightly over 1 percent of that average family's tax bill goes to maintain federal highways. One point four percent funds the CIA and 1.5 percent provides food stamps to those in need.
If you look at it in terms of actual dollars, it costs a family of four $217 to fund NASA, $140 for the IRS, and $75.40 for the federal prison system.
And the one that shocks everybody? The cost to pay all the salaries and benefits to Members of the US Senate and House of Representatives: $1.51 a year.
It's worth noting that the authors only calculated the interest payments on the national debt not the principal.
That's a number that would keep you up tonight, so the actual debt itself isn't included.
The people who put the audit together suggested we just think of it as a giant, terrible unpaid balance on our collective credit card that someone's going to have to pay....eventually.
