Budget Matters Blog

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 ...

Taxes are due on April 15 – right around the corner – though few Americans know where their taxes actually go. So NPP is launching Tax Day 2013 – a suite of materials, including this chart that shows how Washington spent every one of your income tax dollars in 2012.

And get this:

We'll write you a personalized tax receipt

You can share the average taxpayer's receipt on Facebook and Twitter

Four Ways to Take Action

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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 ...

Speaker Boehner/ flickr

At the last possible moment, Congress came to an agreement to avoid the fiscal cliff. The deal affects tax rates, unemployment benefits, and even the price of milk.

Read the details here.

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 ...

Now that the elections are over, in Washington it’s all about the fiscal cliff. If you haven’t heard that phrase yet, you will soon. And often.The term “fiscal cliff” refers to the combination of two major events that will occur at the end of the year should Congress fail to act – the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and the automatic across-the-board funding cuts to federal programs knows as sequestration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, should the tax cuts expire and sequestration kick in, it would likely cause the economy to fall back into a recession ...

Last week we got a call from Ayesha in Houston, Texas. She said she heard Obamacare will be funded through taxes, so she wanted to know how much more she'd have to pay. Here's the scoop.

Only some people will pay higher taxes as a result of Obamacare. Will you be one of them? Here's how to tell. First, if you make more than $200,000 per year (or $250,000 as a married couple), then you should expect to pay additional taxes to fund the health reform law. And second, if you don't have health ...

This election season, National Priorities Project is launching a suite of materials to arm voters with crucial information about what's at stake in November. And part of being informed is knowing what questions to ask candidates. Here are the top six things to ask your congressional candidates about where they stand on this year's most important issues:

6.  What is the best role for the federal government in improving education in this country? (Read the education fact sheet.)

 Flickr/ Joe Shlabotnik

5.  Do you believe Social Security reform is necessary and, if so, what changes would you support ...

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 ...

On our Facebook page, Kevin from Pennsylvania asked about proposals he's heard in recent years in favor of a national sales tax. Given that such proposals generally try to exempt families of certain income levels, would these policies still be considered regressive?

It's a great question, Kevin. Proposals for a national sales tax often appeal to people who support the worthy goal of simplifying our tax system. In fact, a national sales tax wouldn't simplify our tax system, and it would bring with it considerable downsides. While many proposals include provisions to exempt low-income families, it's ...