Monday, April 27, 2009

My Tax Utopia

With all of this talk about how we are going to have to work to pay back the stimulus money that other people get to spend, I was curious what a real tax breakdown looked like. I wanted to know what part of my money went to what programs and also how much money could I save if I only paid for programs that I wanted to. The results are startling.

I found the numbers from this site. He explained how he got them:
Our tax goes to the president's budget. Today, the budget is reckoned at about $3.1 trillion, which has a deficit of about $407 billion. I then went to the Wikipedia budget article and looked up the cost of each program. Then, I calculated what percentage each was of the federal budget. Then, I multiplied the decimal form of each percentage into the income (50233 and 350000) to get the resulting amounts of how much each cost. Since these are rounded estimates, the numbers don't quite match up. They are rough numbers, not the exact numbers. I'm not good enough at Excel for that.
I was initially surprised at how much money goes to welfare, social security, etc... The Department of Defense and the global war on terror just barely beat our payments on social security alone. I consider defense to be one of the main purposes of government.

I added the last column on the spreadsheet pictured below. I dropped all of the programs that I deemed unnecessary by my own view and was able to cut taxes by 65%!! Imagine what you would do with your money if you had 65% more of your taxes back.

This calculation is assuming a lot...I realize that some people only take money from the government and don't pay taxes (I am actually not a big tax payer due to my poor status as a PhD student). I just wanted a rough look at the big picture. Here it is:




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