Does the federal government budget and spend your tax dollars wisely?
In 1948, Florida businessman Dallas Hostetler sat down and calculated how many days he had to work each year to pay his tax bills. According to his estimate, every penny he earned from January through March went to pay taxes. Hostetler called the first day that he began earning money that he could keep for himself Tax Freedom Day. Over time, Tax Freedom Day has been pushed back on the calendar. Experts estimate that the average American today works four full months to fund government at the national, state, and local levels.
The most important revenue source for the federal government is the individual income tax. This is a tax levied on an individual’s or a married couple’s annual income. Individual income is taxed whether it comes from wages or from earnings on investments. Social insurance taxes are a second major source of federal funding. You may have seen these taxes in the form of Social Security and Medicare deductions from a paycheck. These payroll taxes are used to fund pensions and health insurance for the elderly. They also fund unemployment insurance and disability insurance for workers who are laid off or injured on the job.
The third-largest source of federal revenue is the corporate income tax. This is a tax paid by businesses on their profits each year. For this reason, it is sometimes called a profit tax.
The government also raises money with excise taxes. These are taxes levied on the sale of goods, like alcohol, and services. Your family probably pays federal excise tax on its local telephone service.
Federal taxes differ in both what they tax and whether they are progressive or regressive. A progressive tax is one in which the tax burden falls more heavily on wealthy than poor taxpayers. The term progressive refers to the way tax rates progress from low to high as one’s income rises. Individual and corporate income taxes are progressive taxes.
In contrast, a regressive tax is one in which the tax burden, as a percentage of income, falls more heavily on poor taxpayers than on wealthy ones. Excise taxes are an example of a regressive tax. A person earning $20,000 a year pays the same excise tax on local phone service as someone earning $2 million a year. But that tax, measured as a percentage of income, is much higher for the low-income person.
Another way for the government to fund expenditures is borrowing. When federal spending exceeds tax revenue, the government borrows from private sources and foreign countries. In 2011, the government borrowed about $1.3 trillion to fund the deficit.
Only about one-third of government spending is covered by the budget hashed out each year by Congress and the president. That is because most government revenue today is already committed by law to be spent in specified ways. This mandatory spending can be altered only by special legislation that changes the amount to be spent.
The two main categories of mandatory spending are interest on the national debt and entitlements. Entitlements are programs through which individuals receive benefits based on their age, income, or some other criteria. Examples include food stamps and Social Security pensions. The amount of money spent on such programs depends on the number of people who sign up for their benefits, not on an annual appropriation. The amount of federal revenue dedicated to mandatory spending has grown significantly in recent years.
The budget debated in Congress is made up of discretionary spending. Funding for discretionary items can be raised or lowered as Congress sees fit. By far, the biggest chunk of discretionary spending goes to the Department of Defense to support the armed forces. The rest funds the many services provided by federal agencies.
A frequent complaint about the budget process focuses on the practice of using earmarks to set aside funds for specific projects. The 2005 Transportation Equity Act, for instance, included more than 6,000 earmarks for home-district projects. The most notorious was a $223 million set-aside to fund construction of a bridge to a sparsely populated island in Alaska. This much-criticized “bridge to nowhere” was finally removed from the bill, but not before fueling a nationwide debate over the use of earmarks to fund pork-barrel projects. In his State of the Union address in 2007, President George W. Bush called on Congress to begin earmark reform and “expose every earmark to the light of day.
Historically, lawmakers could attach earmarks to bills without identifying themselves. In response to the growing chorus of criticism, Congress has made earmarking more transparent, or open to public scrutiny. For example, sponsors of earmarks are required to make their identity public 48 hours before floor debate begins on the bill to which they have attached spending set-asides.
President Obama also supported earmark reform and called on Congress to increase transparency by publishing earmarks on a Web site open to the public. In 2009, he also asked Congress to regulate earmarks set for private businesses. Soon after, in 2010, Congress banned earmarks to for-profit companies.