Budget Matters Blog

After heroic feats of arithmetic and a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine interpretation of opaque rules and guidelines, millions of Americans will file their taxes by today, April 15. But where does all that money actually go? This simple chart breaks down each income tax dollar – to the tenth of a penny.

We don't stop there, though. We'll write you a personalized tax receipt. Enter how much you paid in income taxes, and we'll show exactly how much you personally contributed to things ranging from the military and nuclear weapons to disaster relief and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

But the ...

April 15—Tax Day—is fast approaching. As we do each year, NPP has published an interactive, personalized receipt that tracks your income tax dollars to the penny.

This year, we’re also launching a new Tax Day tool: trade-offs. Trade-offs estimates how much your city, congressional district, county, or state paid for federal programs in 2012. For example, right here in Northampton, MA, we paid about $7 million dollars for homeland security. Live in the Big Apple? You paid almost $10 billion towards interest on the debt. And the great state of California contributed about $19 million towards the ...

One of the many sources of open government data that NPP scrubs and publishes in the Federal Priorities Database is U.S. Federal Tax Collections. We're highlighting federal income taxes this week as tax season gets into full swing.

With sequestration and Fiscal Cliff II looming, Congress and President Obama are once again tackling the spending side of the federal budget. But spending is only half of any budget. The income taxes due on April 15 — along with the excise, payroll, estate, trust, and gift taxes that we pay — are the other half of our nation's budget: revenue ...

The U.S. National Archives/ flickr

A reader from Shelby Township, Michigan, wrote to us to ask about the Bush-era tax cuts. "How much revenue would the federal government get," he wrote, "if taxes were raised on the people making more than $200,000 per year?" It's a very timely question. Bush-era tax cuts for high earners are the most contentious part of negotiations raging over the so-called fiscal cliff.

In Washington, Republican lawmakers have put their support behind extending the entire package of Bush-era tax cuts while Democrats say they want to see the tax cuts expire for ...

Lila Carpenter is from Belfast, Maine. She's starting her first year at New York University, where she'll be studying political science.

I used to be oblivious to the inner workings of my pay stub, and how the taxes I pay are used by the federal government. As a recent high school graduate, working two jobs and preparing for college, reading A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget has been a real eye-opener. As I prepare to vote for the first time this fall, and enter into college as a political science major, I am more aware of ...

In last month’s The Untold Story of Deficits in Washington, Mattea Kramer wrote that tax credits, deductions, and exclusions in the individual and corporate income tax codes cost the U.S. federal government $1.3 trillion in tax revenue. When these tax expenditures are added to grant money, we get a more complete picture of federal spending:

"But wait," wrote several of you, "taking less of our money is not the same thing as spending."Think of it this way. Each year, your individual income tax bill to the federal government comes due. The amount you owe depends on ...

Tax day is a week away, and this year National Priorities Project writes you a receipt for how much you paid in federal income taxes-- so you can see exactly how much of your own 2011 income taxes went to the military, health programs, education, and everything else.

But some people are wondering why our tax receipt is different from ones put out by the White House and some other research organizations. The White House asks you how much you paid in federal income taxes, but it also asks how much you paid in Social Security taxes and in Medicare ...