How Uncle Sam Spends Your Tax Money

…lots of unlucky Americans are mailing their tax returns (or procrastinating doing so) to Uncle Sam. April 15 is the dreaded “Tax Day”

“Of the $2.7 trillion federal tax coffers, about 20% goes to military spending, 20% to Social Security payments, and 15% to Medicare for theelderly and disabled. An additional 35% funds education, government agencies, and a range of social programs. And the remaining 10%? That’sfor interest payments to service the debt from all that spending.”

“Costs exceed revenues by far, but the Defense Dept. budget just keeps increasing. That means bigger interest payments on our debt.”

“To service the $9 trillion-and-growing national debt, the U.S. government spent $406 billion on interest in 2006, up 13% since 2001. All told, about 15 cents of each tax dollar is spent on interest payments.”

Read this great article, it fits perfectly with our latest unit in Macro. Gives lots of current numbers about government spending and the national deficit.

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About the author:  Jason Welker teaches International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement Economics at Zurich International School in Switzerland. In addition to publishing various online resources for economics students and teachers, Jason developed the online version of the Economics course for the IB and is has authored two Economics textbooks: Pearson Baccalaureate’s Economics for the IB Diploma and REA’s AP Macroeconomics Crash Course. Jason is a native of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and is a passionate adventurer, who considers himself a skier / mountain biker who teaches Economics in his free time. He and his wife keep a ski chalet in the mountains of Northern Idaho, which now that they live in the Swiss Alps gets far too little use. Read more posts by this author

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