Where Does Your Paycheck Go? - revisited

A previous post regarding how my personal paycheck is allocated each week left me thinking that I need to start devoting some of my available income to the tax for people who are bad at math or find a long, lost, wealthy relative. As it turns out, the kind public servants at the US Government Printing Office care about how its paycheck, US tax revenues, is allocated as well. Originally, John W. Schoen at MSNBC responds to the question, "Where do my income tax dollars go?" The answers are later distilled by the Consumerist (with hourly tallies included by yours truly):

• Health Care: $219.40 - 8.78 hours
• Social Security: $206.60 - 8.26 hours
• Military: $196.50 - 7.86 hours
• Income Security (Unemployment insurance, food and housing, retirement for federal workers, etc): $132.70 - 5.31 hours
• Interest on Debt (The US Government's Version of Credit Card Payments): $85.30 - 3.41 hours
• Transportation: $26.50 - 1.06 hours
• Colleges: $19.00 - 0.76 hours
• Federal disaster relief and insurance spending: $17.40 - 0.70 hours
• Administration of justice: $15.40 - 0.62 hours
• Public Schools (K-12): $15.00 - 0.60 hours
• The Environment: $12.40 - 0.50 hours
• Agriculture: $9.80 - 0.39 hours
• General government costs: $6.90 - 0.28 hours
• International development and humanitarian assistance: $6.30 - 0.25 hours
• Social services related to education and training: $6.20 - 0.25 hours
• Space Program: $5.50 - 0.22 hours
• General science and basic research: $3.40 - 0.14 hours
• Community and regional development: $3.20 - 0.13 hours
• Workers training programs: $2.70 - 0.11 hours


• Totals: $990.20 - 39.61 hours

Perhaps the unlisted $9.80 - .39 hours goes to some slushfund?

If I ignore the Federal progressive tax rates and assume that the $1000/week earner and myself are taxed at the same rate, let's see what happens when I cram the figures above into my previously claimed allocations (5.325 hours each week to fund Federal and State taxes, 2.950 hours each week to fund Medicare and Social Security and 2.254 hours each week to fund personal health, dental and vision insurance).

Coming soon! Until then...

Interesting:

• The sum of the top three categories are a full 70% more than the sum of all other categories combined
  
• More is spent on arresting and detaining criminals than is spent on educating a nation of K-12 graders
• 4.5 times more money is spent on the government's interest payments than on college contributions (where the majority of students take loans to pay interest back to the government and multi-national financial services firms)
• More than 5 times the amount of potential preventive and proactive local and community development funding is spent/squandered on disaster relief after the fact
  

Sigh....