Where did my taxes go?

greesil

Insurance company with an army primarily. But now with an expensive credit card bill.

NDlurker

How many people are murdered per dollar spent on "defense"?

patrickthebold

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.

kamikazeturtles

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

GiorgioG

Interest on the national debt is by far the largest share. Both political parties spend like drunken sailors.

khernandezrt

If the US had a credit score, I wonder what it would be?

JohnMakin

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.

arjie

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.

alexb_

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

lastofthemojito

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.

waynecochran

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...

bko

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/

johnmlussier

Welfare, defense, interest on debt. That’s it.

cultofmetatron

If only I could elect to send 4000 to NASA and not to enable israel's genocide in the middle east. edit: bring on the downvotes, israel is committng a genocide and doing it with out tax dollars.

throwanem

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.

johnmlussier

Debt. Defense. Dole.

slg

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.

tuan

Since we renamed DOD to DOW, should the Defense budget be renamed too?

ForHackernews

In the UK, HMRC provides this breakdown itself to every taxpayer in their online portal.

janalsncm

Shouldn’t the “defense” line item be called “war” now since the department has been renamed? It’s more accurate anyways.