I filed my tax return electronically on March 8. My refund (I made out like GE) has been not just deposited but spent.
For you poor souls who are still banging away at your W-2's (and there are lots of you)... well, what the heck are you doing reading a blog? Get back to your calculator!
But when you're done, check out this nifty Tax Receipt from your friendly neighborhood POTUS. Punch in your income tax, and President Obama's widget-makers will put an exact dollar figure to your contribution toward paying soldiers, building weapons, paying doctor bills for Grandma and poor kids, launching space shuttles, and other cool things that we do better as a national community than as anarcho-capitalists.
According to the Tax Receipt categories, here are the ten biggest chunks that come out of each dollar we pay in federal income tax:
| Medicaid & CHIP | 10.7¢ |
| Ongoing military ops, equip, supplies | 10.5¢ |
| Medicare | 10.3¢ |
| Military R&D, weapons, construction | 8.8¢ |
| Interest | 7.4¢ |
| Military pay and benefits | 6.0¢ |
| Federal military and civilian employee retirement and disability | 4.6¢ |
| Unemployment insurance | 4.4¢ |
| Food and nutrition assistance | 3.6¢ |
| Earned income, making work pay, and child tax credits | 3.5¢ |
Those ten budget lines consume about 70 cents of each dollar you see on Line 76 of your 1040. A quarter and a penny go to the Pentagon. Almost another quarter goes to health care. Foreign development and humanitarian assistance gets seven tenths of a penny... the same amount we spend launching things into outer space.
Know what you're paying for: check out the White House Tax Receipt!