The federal income tax filing deadline looms Monday, prompting a look at just how the government is spending all of our tax dollars.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of the Fiscal Service, for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2023, is both informative and scary.
According to the fiscal services people, the leading claim on tax dollars is Social Security, at .22 of every dollar.
Medicare, also largely an expense for the aging, is in a tie for second place at .14 of each tax dollar. The other category coming in at 14 cents per dollar is a catch-all labeled health. Mostly, that is federal money funneled to states to support Medicaid, which is medical care for low income people – increasingly illegal immigrants!
So, between Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we’re up to about half of every tax dollar being spent.
Much-maligned national defense comes in at 13 percent, along with another vague category entitled “income security.” And that “income security” would include, according to the story, such things as unemployment compensation, nutrition assistance and housing assistance.
By now, if you’ve been paying attention you probably have some questions, just as I do.
Workers have Social Security tax collected from their paychecks and their employers pay a matching amount. Supposedly, the money is invested in special treasury bonds, which pay interest. In effect this is the government lending out retirement funds to itself.
Is that 22 cents of annual cost out of each tax dollar to fund Social Security above and beyond all the revenue collected?
This is a significant point because as recently as March of this year the government issued a financial report putting unfunded future obligations to pay Social Security and Medicare at $73.2 trillion. That’s money that must be borrowed and you wonder why the programs have been allowed to fall so far into arrears.
Similarly contradictory is the income security category. Employees and employers pay into unemployment funds. If those contributions are even close to paying the bills, apparently they are overwhelmed by handouts such as Section 8 housing vouchers and SNAP food programs. Flooding the country with illegal immigrants only worsens this problem, too.
Denver just reported it won’t be filling job vacancies and otherwise failing to deliver accustomed services in order to have money to divert to funding illegal immigrants.
There was a boob who once wrote a vanity column for the local paper. Call her Sister Moonbeam. She cobbled up a figure of illegal immigrants paying billions of dollars in taxes and so deserving benefits.
Like most of her ilk, she was short on details, such as how exactly she documented that figure since illegals, by definition, are operating under the radar and won’t have things such as Social Security cards, won’t be on the record of employers’ books, and won’t file tax returns.
Illegals are a large, and growing, expense for a nation already living too far beyond its means. If this country were an individual it already would be in bankruptcy proceedings.
The report of how tax dollars are spent measures interest expense at .11 of each tax dollar, but doesn’t note that we are borrowing an ever increasing amount of money to fund federal spending and that figure only stands to increase.
The Bipartisan Policy Center reports the federal deficit for the month of March was $236 billion. So far in the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 2023, our cumulative federal budget deficit is $1.1 trillion.
We’re in a financial hole as a nation that we never can escape, short of hyperinflating the money so the debts can be repaid in virtually worthless dollars. And every day, we dig the hole that much deeper.
Pay your taxes with a smile. Remember, Uncle Sam desperately needs the money and there are millions of illegal immigrants depending on you.
Sam Ross Jr's site 