Where do your taxes go?
Mistermix at Balloon-Juice has an interesting post:
The taxpayer receipt has been making the rounds of blogs this week. The example used in the white paper shows that most of the taxes for someone earning the US median income goes to Medicare and Social Security.
That’s true, but it’s interesting to play around with the do-it-yourself version and use the mean family income (instead of the median personal income). As income goes up, the percentage of income that goes to federal income tax versus FICA goes up, which makes entitlements a smaller piece of the pie. And as entitlements get smaller, the amount allotted to defense and debt get bigger.
For someone making the mean household income of around $60K, filing as married with one child, around $3,000 of total tax burden goes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Almost as much ($2,900) goes to military and police, and $500 goes to debt service. I wonder how the average American is going to react to that.
(Here’s a big image of the whole calculation, and here’s the paycheck calculator that I used.)
