[DSingularity]

Nobody has faith in the governments ability to put that money to good use. The US gov uses significant amounts of its budget to fund weapon development, promote weapon sales, change unfriendly foreign governments, support friendly foreign governments, and genocide troublesome foreign populations. Who will support raising more taxes to maintain and expand such efforts?

[mjevans]

Offhand, I'm unaware of where to even look to get an easy to digest version of 'where tax dollars go'. Would the GAO make such a report? Something for Congress otherwise? Would there be a classified and an public version?

Even better would be a tool that, E.G. with your IRS filing number, shows how much 'you' paid in, breaks down where that went, and shows how 'you' compare to other areas.

Such tools and reports would cost money, but making them is practically an audit anyway which is a good use of resources in a bureaucracy (part of the self-calibration system).

[LaffertyDev]

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

What you seek is available and has been available for a very long time. Mathing out how your individual tax dollars map to these buckets is a fairly straightforward (IMO) exercise.

[blargey]

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function (linked on that page but easy to miss) provides a great visualization/interface for the budget that can drill down deep into each category's sub-categories and beyond.

OTOH they might be asking more specifically for a view that controls for how different tax/income sources might be earmarked for specific spending, thus skewing how income tax dollars are distributed compared to the overall budget distribution - though I'm not sure that's going to change one's income tax dollar distribution much. AFAIK even social security is only nominally funded by social security tax, and the deficit means there's debt filling the gaps everywhere anyway.

[mjevans]

That page is a good start. It at least shows the breakdown of % by programs, etc.

However as you point out there are different types and methods of tax which go to different bins. The IRS filings are the most likely place to have all that together.

*value for taxation* is also really difficult to discern. The report needs to help break down where someone's tax dollars went...

But it also needs to help collectively show how tax dollars _benefit_ them. That one not just in the taxes they paid but overall based on where they are and what they're doing.

[plantain]

Many civilized countries give you a receipt when you file your taxes that show exactly how your contribution was spent:

https://www.ato.gov.au/api/public/content/385a815c51944638a3...

[sirbutters]

Letting billionaires hoard all the money has gotten us to where we are today. It seems worse than government mismanaging the budget. Was that concern also there in the 50s and 60s when the wealthy was taxed at a substantial higher rate? I don't believe so. It all seems to point at the failure of trickled down economics of Reagan.

[sabarn01]

The us was the only industrialized economy to come out ww2 unscathed. We didn't have to compete for 2 decades. The end results of these policies was the stagnate 70s Reagan was a corrective. However, the policies of Regan only made sense in that context. Republicans became too found of cutting top end taxes when most of what could be gained already was in the 80s. There is no historical period to look at on how to deal with the consequences of integrating China with the rest of the world.

[wesapien]

It's the elite wealth pump. Capital is a non-state entity but through corporations was granted person hood by states without a social contract. Trickle down economics was a complete scam and Richard Cantillon has the receipts for it.

[inglor_cz]

Your answer is somewhat typical for Americans: because in my experience, Americans tend to think that all American developments are caused by domestic factors - governance, taxes, billionaires, whatever. Insular thinking, as if the rest of the world did not matter. Left or right, this is a fairly frequent pattern in the US.

But in the meantime, over a billion people elsewhere got out of poverty and built relatively developed economies. The US is no longer an automatic Nr 1 on the world scene by this fact alone. How precisely do you want to keep a massive edge over a billion hardworking East Asians who now have a lot of capital and know-how at their disposal?

Neither Musk nor Lenin can solve this. The US is simply in a relative decline.

[saturn8601]

>How precisely do you want to keep a massive edge over a billion hardworking East Asians who now have a lot of capital and know-how at their disposal?

Promote the lie down movement in the short term and let the negative birth rate take care of them in the long term. Thats the only way unless the US somehow gets a magical AGI and robots before China.

[inglor_cz]

"let the negative birth rate take care of them in the long term"

There is a presumption hidden in that sentence: namely, that procreation will always be left up to the people and their decisions. That is far from certain. If anyone has the nerve to actually develop and deploy artificial wombs, it is China. And the resulting kids will be simply pushed onto young people to raise - an authoritarian country won't have to ask anyone.

Having kids is one of the last almost-non-industrialized attributes of human lives, most people are still being born in the same way as they used to in the Stone Age. I wonder how long will that situation last.

[card_zero]

Hey! That's a new sci-fi idea I think. Citizen, nurture your doughy cuckoo-clone, or there will be measures. I don't think this has been done.

I guess it's a bit Handmaid's Tale.

[saturn8601]

>If anyone has the nerve to actually develop and deploy artificial wombs, it is China. And the resulting kids will be simply pushed onto young people to raise - an authoritarian country won't have to ask anyone.

We will have to take that info as it comes. I was working off the info we have today. Their birth rate (as well as the birth rate of most of the world) is horrendous. This was a problem they should have started tackling 20-30 years ago.