Your Tax Dollars at Work
Published February 23, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
When folks gripe about paying taxes, I often ask if they drive on local roads and how they find the quality of those roads. To me that's the most tangible level of your tax dollars at work (or not, as the case may be). Maybe it's an urban planning thing.
Hilzoy gets at the true cost to taxpayers from Obama's housing plan much better than I have. The first phase costs taypayers "roughly zero. While Fannie and Freddie would receive less money in payments, this would be balanced out by a reduction in defaults and foreclosures."
The second part - the $75 billion - is taxpayer funded, and this appears to be the least popular part of the plan, as we argue over who deserves this assistance. Hilzoy, with my emphases:
Anyone who thinks that the mortgage plan should have a way to determine whether the people it's trying to help sent their kids to private schools or took expensive vacations or put in marble countertops is presumably willing to spend the large sums of money it would take to find that sort of thing out about the 3-4 million people the loan modification program is designed to reach. Moreover, s/he should be willing to accept the serious intrusion into people's privacy that this sort of investigation into people's past spending would entail. And s/he should also be prepared to reach many fewer people, since presumably a number of people would not be able to document that all their spending fell within whatever guidelines we deem acceptable...
If we base decisions about who qualifies for the loan modification program on relatively simple criteria -- income, size of loan, other debts and assets -- then we can carry it out relatively simply. But if we insist on figuring out whether each and every applicant spent too much on their vacation in the recent past, or renovated their bathroom without a government-approved reason, or violated the Guidelines on Acceptable Countertop Materials that the Department of Housing would need to draw up, or sent their kids to private schools, we should be willing to pay for the army of bureaucrats who will need to pore over people's financial histories in order to make that kind of determination.
If you really want to know where your tax dollars go, check out this graph of the federal budget. Hint: war, health and the aged.
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Comments (2)
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Author
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Leigh is a PhD candidate in urban planning at MIT, and a consultant on U.S. Gulf Coast recovery. She sits on the Board of the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation in Boston, and has worked with non-profits, foundations and local governments on policies and programs aimed at reducing urban poverty and inequality.
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This is a graph of federal spending which includes funds from more than our taxes. Trust funds such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have their own dedicated revenues. Income, gift and estate taxes are not used to fund them. If you take those very large slices of pie out you find out that many more taxes - percentage wise - goes to the military budget - about 36% now.
This graph also stacks some coins that could fit in the military slice into other slices. The discretionary fund is bloated with military spending - so much that peaceniks like to only show the discretionary fund to illustrate how too much money goes to the military - but unfortunately it's an exaggeration and lie used to make an otherwise sound argument.
This chart also only reflects the budget of current military operations and does not illustrate the amount of money spent on past wars that we continue to pay. A large percentage of the interest we pay on debt goes to debt accumulated from military borrowing ... err... "spending." Veteran administration and health costs are also not included in the military operations (defense) budget.
In the end, the FCNL estimates that almost 43% of tax money (not the federal budget) funds war. http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=2336&issue_id=19
If you prefer to view the entire federal budget and not just spending from tax dollars - which you can argue is a reasonable view (though I don't) - then it's still important to realize how we compare with the rest of the world. In 2008, US military spending accounted for 48%(!) of the entire WORLD's military spending. We spend more on our military than Europe, China, East Asia (excluding China), Russia and all of the Middle East and N. Africa COMBINED!
... and yet with our high and mighty military we still fail to bring stability to places like Iraq and Afghanistan or solve global issues. (Infact we make them worse.) You are what you do most - and right now that idiom makes us warmongerers.
I'll try not to divert too far from the topic of poverty in America but it is VERY closely related to topics of War and Peace (and another blog here at change.org) Ultimately, we're wasting money on destruction which could be allocated more towards creation - relieving poverty.
Posted by Jeremy Keith Hammond on 02/25/2009 @ 07:57AM PT
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Jeremy - thanks for the input and alternative graph. Much better.
Posted by Leigh Graham on 02/25/2009 @ 10:09AM PT
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