Need a Receipt On Taxes? The Federal Tax Receipt

ndogg writes "The White House has opened up a tool that lets you see where your tax dollars are being spent. I put my numbers in and it showed that a little over a quarter goes towards defense and military spending (I'm not sure I'm getting my money's worth on that one), and a little under a quarter for health care." I'm sure readers (and think tanks of various stripes) will have some alternative narratives, too. For readers elsewhere; it's tax season here in the US.

Comments

Re:I like paying taxes

[benjamindees]

Civilization doesn't require taxes. And the USA barely qualifies as civilized. Besides, taxes are voluntary.

Dangerous fallacy

[SuperKendall]

Taxes buy culture. Education systems may not be ideal - but they advance the average human state in ways that it is hard to quantify in everyday terms.

Whoa there. Taxes do *NOT* buy "culture". Or education. At least not at the federal level.

There are plenty of museums and theaters that would all do just fine without federal taxes. At the federal level spending on education is worse than a waste of money, because you are giving almost nothing to the actual process of education, just bureaucracy that mandates how education has to be done - and as we have seen plainly now, adding money into that system simply produces dumber kids out the other side.

Local taxes for those things make a lot of sense, because they are collected close to where they will be used and therefore there is a great deal of oversight that can be done. Sending any money to washing leads you with very uncertain results out the other side, except you know a lot of money goes in with worse results year on year out the other end.

Infrastructure is great. That's not what our taxes are doing; therefore currently much of our taxes are a waste of money.

You totally misunderstand the feeling on taxes among fiscal conservatives, they want to see money collected spent wisely and that simply almost never happens at a federal level.