A week ago was National Tax Filing Day. The day grown-ups suck it up and acknowledge that the society we participate in, that exists within the geographic border of the United States of America, is in fact something that costs money.
Via the Facebook, I found a link to the National Priorities Organization which had a neat tool detailing what my tax bill paid for this year.
Getting away from the demagoguery that swallows any rational discourse, I decided to analyze my tax bill according to this tool and decide if I should really be annoyedor not. My federal tax bill was $18,639.00 for fiscal year 2013. Our household got a little of our withheld earnings back. (So the Federal gov’t held a whopping $1,039.00 of our earnings interest free, and the State of Alabama will return a similar amount).
Military - $5,050.35
I’m a liberal. I’ve never thought that the key to national security is “the best defense is a good offense.” I also am not a “hippie” who thinks if everyone puts down the weapons that we will suddenly live in a John Lennon world. This $5,050.35 figure does not bother me one bit. Aircraft carriers, battleships, tanks, B-2 Bombers, the Coast Guard, and, most importantly, soldiers & sailors keep people off the shores of the United States who would come to kill us and conquer us. These people and things also help us sell goods to other people around the world and help us buy stuff from other people. (Hey, how did that BMW get here?)
I’m glad a chunk of that figure goes to developing weapons that reduce the size of the armed forces; i.e the people we put into uniforms, because that means fewer of our people in harm’s way. I do think this figure could be lower because the United States really does have enough fire power at the push of a button to destroy most of the world. After all, my $129.67 for nuclear weapons should deter somebody… right? So all in all, no reason to gripe about this problem.
Health - $4,236.26
The Tax Tool only provides details for Medicaid and CHIP, but its safe to assume that Medicare is part of this. To me, $2,354.29 for Medicare and the Affordable Care Act is a quasi insurance/savings account. Why does Medicare exist? Because once a person hits a certain age, when medical care is a daily part of one's life, the person becomes uninsurable. Speaking from personal experience, I’m rather okay with this figure. My grandfather is 95. He’s spent the last 4+ weeks in a hospital. The bill for this care is probably out of the roof and would devastate his savings, probably my father’s savings, and mine if we hadn’t already paid into the system through years of taxes. At the very least, he will be afforded the ability to die with dignity because Medicare pays for hospice. Money well spent, or saved, or invested. Just depends on how you look at it.
Medicaid seems to anger a lot of people. I’m not sure why. The $1,813.78 of my taxes that pays for Medicaid helps a lot of people who are disabled and can’t work. Many other people simply don’t have the money to pay for health insurance even though they do work. At the very least, Medicaid lets people go to the doctor and prevents disease from spreading.
I pay $68.19 per year to the C.H.I.P, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I’m a fairly charitable person (but admittedly see room for improvement) The only complaint I’ve heard about C.H.I.P. is that Senator Ted Kennedy promoted it and therefore anything he contributed too must be a bad thing. I’m glad children can get some health care off of my $68.19. I need a better reason to not pay for a kid's healthcare besides the fact a law's champion came from a womanizing alcoholic.
Not mentioned in the readout is the Center for Disease Control. Watch “Outbreak” or “Contagion.” I’m ecstatic that my tax money for the CDC to help monitor diseases and prevent epidemics.
Unemployment & Labor - $1,824.26
$114.63 of my taxes goes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. By my count, that’s about what I pay to my church in a two-month span and it goes to a similar purpose. And unlike my Church, TANF money requires people to find a job and has a cap on the benefits.
$48.97 for Job Training and Employment Programs. I’m ok with a less than $50 of my taxes going into a pot to train a laid off worker in a dying industry some new job skills in order to work in stable or growing industry. Once that worker is back in the work force, he’s contributing to the tax bill too.
The rest of this line item is a bit of a mystery. The unknown requires more questions to be asked.
Veterans Benefits - $941.89
I’ve never stood a post. I read the paper and follow Jon Stewart’s monitoring of the Veteran’s Administration. When these brave men & women come back from a combat zone, sometimes experiencing (or doing) horrible things on behalf of us, it is our duty to help them out with medical care. Some statistics cite that ¼ of homeless men are former veterans. A good chunk of those funds helps pay for their burial after their corpse is discovered on a park bench. My only gripe is our country needs to find a way to have fewer veterans… which might happen if Congress and Presidents quit going to war. I know the VA systems are antiquated and we could give them a better service, with less overhead, if the system was modernized.
A whopping $35.52 pays for the pensions of those soldiers and sailors that make military service their life’s career. Thank you! Soldier and Sailors, of all ranks, deserve a retirement just like the rest of us.
Food & Agriculture - $940.49
A good chunk of this goes to Corporate Farming in the form of subsidies to either pay for gas to move those tractors that make our food OR to not grow food. This tax bill makes my food cheaper to buy, and consequently make it cheaper for everyone to buy food. The rest of the tax money goes to crazy things like policing food manufacturers so our food is safe to eat. I’m happy the “Free market” has some oversight because one case of avoiding serious food poisoning is worth $940.49.
$45.39 goes to Food Stamps. I give more than that to my food pantry at church. The problem with my church's food pantry is that it really only serves the people who can travel to it. I'm okay with $45.39 going to food stamps, even if 20% of it is lost to fraud.
Government - $847.94
The line items here are $85.13 for Border Protection and $47.29 for Federal Corrections. Paying less than $50 to keep people who’ve hurt our society in prison is a great frigging deal! Just think, Jeffrey Dahmer in jail for less than $50.00! For anyone who has a strong opinion on immigration, $85.13 for those Border Patrolmen and a fence along the Rio Grande probably sounds like too little is being spent.
The balance of this $715.52 goes to paying for the Federal Court System; the F.B.I.; the U.S. Marshall Service, your Congressmen, Senators, and President’s salary; staffs of these people, the gov’t employees who operate all the buildings these people work in, and a slew of other things that are boring and mundane. Security guards are a huge part of this expense. So basically, this expense is for the general law & order that allows us to do business with each other and gives us some police to help us out when someone violates that law & order.
Housing and Community - $744.12
$25.20 of my taxes went to the Home Energy Assistance Program that paid for people with far less money than I to pay for heating oil and electricity so they don’t freeze to death during the winter.
$43.56 went to the “Community Development Block Grant.” Housing projects. $43.56 to give people with less me than a roof over their head. I’m okay with $43.56 helping someone have a home, even if its not a great one.
The balance of $675.36 has helped local governments, like my home town and the suburb I grew up in, to get money for sidewalks, parks, and stuff like that. I like parks, sidewalks, and traffic lights. The Federal Gov’t give the money in bulk to my city and then audits how it is spent, because local gov’ts have a tendency to be even more corrupt than the Federal Gov’t. (or at least that is true in Jefferson County, Alabama).
Education - $378.61
$3.03 for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting is money well spent. I love Sesame Street, PBS Newshour, Frontline, and quite a few people love Downton Abbey. An ESPN Bundle on your cable is about $6.95 per month. Put that in perspective.
$232.91 for Pell Grants, Work Study, and other Student Aid is fine by me, but I understand some griping because I have complaints too. The programs for higher education are a good idea in principle. I’ve got a problem with the “for-profit” universities that are taking advantage of these programs to line their pockets and not really teaching the students anything of value.
I’d like to know more about this category. I live in Alabama and the minority of people fighting the majority’s ignorance needs as much money and help from any source as it can possibly get.
Energy and Environment - $345.65
Whether a person likes fossil fuels or not, your taxes go to subsidies to help keep the cost of a gallon of gas for cars, buses, and commercial vehicles low. Doing the math, I drive 1,000 miles per month and get about 16 miles to the gallon. So I use about 62.5 gallons of gas. 18.4 cents per gallon goes to taxes for highways, so I spend 81.6 cents for gas. The subsidy probably saves me $1.00 per gallon or $62.50 per month or $750 per year. So from a bottom line standpoint, I think my tax money in relation to gasoline is well spent. Without doing the research, I’m sure our collective tax dollars for nuclear energy and/or coal fired power plants operate under a similar system. I think I am saving money. (Oh, and some of that tax is to put gas in reserve so if something bad ever does happen, our country has gas to fill up military defense vehicles to shoot at people trying to kill us or to ship us food).
$10.44 of this is spent on the National Forest System. Sounds like a damn good return on my investment. I like trees. I like the deer that breed in those woods that I can hunt and later eat. Oh yeah, and oxygen those trees produce.
International Affairs - $282.07
I have two friends that work for the State Department and U.S. A.I.D., respectively. I’ve seen first hand what it takes to train them and the valuable work performed. $173.88 of this amount goes to programs around the world that are humanitarian. Whether positive or negative, lots of Americans have a strong opinion about President George W. Bush. One accomplishment most of those opinions agree about is his strong push towards AIDS/HIV health in Africa. I’m okay with $173.08 paying some State Dep’t and U.S. A.I.D. employees money to help alleviate the human suffering caused by a horrible disease.
Transportation - $253.53
$7.41 goes for towards the Emergency Aid for Public Transportation. If you lived in NYC after Hurricane Sandy or Tuscaloosa, Alabama after the April 27, 2011 tornado, then this money probably helped you directly. The rest of it went to public highways, air traffic controllers, and trains. All of this transportation allows us to move goods and services that give us a job. No griping on my part. $246.12 to drive on toll free interstate highways, pay for TSA officers to screen passengers, and railroad inspectors to move stuff around the country is well worth it.
Science - $208.89
$117.78 goes to NASA. I do not think NASA is a waste of money. The rest goes to a variety of items including grants to scientists that discover stuff to help make our life better. Some of the experiments get twisted by politicians to justify cutting this expense, but if you believe knowledge has value than we have to trust that undirected research requires us to trust scientist to take their research wherever the evidence and facts leads them (even if the hypotheses sound silly or morally questionable before delving into the facts that the scientist is hoping to discover or prove).
Interest - $2,584.33
This part is annoying because it means 13.8% of my taxes for debts to pay for the previous projects in all of the above categories. Interest sucks when you evaluate your own household budget. However, household debt as compared to government debt is not a rational analogy. Corporate bond debt as compared to household debt is not a rational analogy. Consider this: states with a “balanced budget”, like my home state of Alabama, are some of the poorest in the country. Some of that debt is going to pay for stuff I use everyday (for example, Interstate Highways).
Conclusions:
I sure notice a lot of people are upset about food stamps, “welfare” and other “handouts.” Obviously, I’m not as upset as others about what I am giving up for these alleged “handouts,” as my costs, as well as the similar costs of most of my upper-middle class contemporaries, for those things appear to be minimal. Usually after pointing out this reality, the upset person pivots to the collective numbers for “fraud and waste.” When those waste/fraud figures are compared to our individual incomes, the amount is staggering; but the collective amount of my money that is wasted is minimal. Honestly, I probably waste more money on impulse purchases in the grocery store line than the amount of my tax money subject to waste/fraud for these handout programs. Waste and fraud deserve serious attention, but throwing under the bus our fellow citizens who are trying to make a better life for themselves, or even for the people who have given up on themselves, because some people abuse the system is hardly a solution. When talking about a country of 300,000,000 people, I’m fairly certain my $18,639 has bought me some safety for both home and abroad, healthy living, and advanced the notion we can live in a civilized society that cares for one another in a better manner than the generation before.
(Forgive any typos or grammar errors. I'm not trying to make a living or name for myself with this Blog. I am writing down my thoughts and if anyone does me the courtesy of reading it, I only hope it is a competent entry into the marketplace of ideas).
