I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.
There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.
But it's misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The money is not being spent on "Health" but on the "Health department". What percentage of that money actually delivers health, and what merely funds the bureaucracy?
Here in the UK only about a third of defence spending goes on the armed forces themselves. Another third goes on service pensions, which is fine, but running the MoD itself is a full third of the budget! It wouldn’t surprise me if the same was true of the NHS.
The problem with that is that there is no direct correlation between tax receipts and budget outlays. Money being spent in 2021 is not being "paid for" by taxes received in 2021, or for that matter in 2022, 2023, or any other particular year. That's the theoretical problem; the practical problems you encounter as a result include how you deal with programs that are technically 'paid for' by specific taxes (do you try to present those separately or exclude them?), how you account for budget deficits (do you present a breakdown that adds up to >100% of the tax bill?), and how you deal with tax expenditures.
I mean, forgive me for being obtuse, but...why do we even pay taxes at all? Like, I understand the "prole logic" of a balance between income and expenditures, but if the government doesn't seem to care, why should I?
In the longer term, the ability of taxpayers to pay taxes is a signal of the nation's ability to produce enough to meet its debt. It's just spread over an extended period.
Paying taxes is a form of civic participation. Sounds crazy, but reading about the system Russia uses makes me leery of forcing the government to make itself financially independent of its citizenry.
Theirs is a system called "tributary taxation." How it works is, anybody who is anybody in Russia has a boss. Not a boss like you have a boss, a political boss, think Boss Tweed back in the day. That boss has a boss, who has a boss, and so on until you have the one person in Russia all this money flows to, President Putin.
How much do you pay to your boss? As much as you wish/can. This isn't the mob. The price for falling behind isn't Ivan turning your knees into baseballs. You simply find yourself slowly forced out of political relevance. Pay to play at it's highest and finest. At a certain level you become untouchable by low-level cops and the like.
The government getting its operating budget from us makes the government accountable to citizens in the end. What we call 'corruption' becomes the norm otherwise.
There’s something similar for the UK here[0], but my guess is that most people don’t care beyond “defence”, which in the UK is 5% and the US is 15%. As others have mentioned though, there’s potentially a pretty good multiplier effect [1] on military hardware acquisition.
Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:
