What Percentage of Your Tax Dollar Really Goes to Help the Free-Loading, Indigent, Ought-to-Get-a-Job American's? [56]

I HAVE been meeting to write this hub for awhile and kept forgetting, I hate old age, and heard something today on CNN's Cafferty's File that brought to mind again. An e-mail response to one of Cafferty's questions regarding raising taxes on the wealthy got a response that went something like this: "Why should the money the wealthy worked hard for be transferred to the poor who hardly work at all." Actually, it wasn't the cut-and-dried but that was the implication. There was nothing in the response about helping fellow Americans fellow American's brought low because of the unethical conduct of many of those same wealthy tax payers. But I digress; that is fodder for a different hub.

I hope you understand, and just to be clear, the title to this Hub is a bit of sarcasm directed at those who don't believe in the Christian maxim of being your brother's keeper. Back on track, I took a look at the 2012 Federal Budget actuals for 2010 to calculate what percentage of your taxes go toward what part of the budgets. That is going to back this my shortest hub to-date ... you may clap now. The table below presents my findings which are show how many cents of your tax dollar go what expenditure area.

... but I have some remarks anyway.

1. If you consider TARP being considered a form of welfare, and most do, then only 6 cents out of every tax dollars goes toward providing welfare services to those who can't provide for themselves. If you don't, the figure increases all the way up to ... 9 cents
2. The other $ .91 or 91% of your taxes go support the operations of the government or defense. You ultimately get the Social Security and Medicare back.
3. Individual income taxes only provide 26 cents of the revenue dollar needed to fund the 2010 expenditures. 37 cents came for other revenue sources and the last 37 cents was borrowed.

Betcha' haven't seen it presented that way before, have you? I just love being a cost analyst. Here you thought your tax dollar was such a big deal, lol. To tell the truth, I was floored when I finished my spreadsheet, I had no idea; but it sure does open the door to a whole lot of new opportunities for discussion and lines of logic, doesn't it. (Does anybody know if you put question marks after rhetorical questions?)

I am going to have to think about my discovery (about an hour ago). But, in the meantime, what should be obvious to all, and I mean all, even the Conservatives who complain the loudest, is that the amount of your taxes paid each year that go toward helping the temporarily helpless is pathetically small! To listen to the Conservative rhetoric regarding this issue however, you would think that if we could somehow cut this portion of expenditures out ot the budget, you could cut the tax rate in half; not.

This isn't the hub, of course, to get into the moral aspects of whether or not the wealthy should or should not contribute more of their disposable income than those who have no disposable income but, to only point out that if their taxes were increased most of it would be used to support programs such has Defense, Intelligence, Dept of State, Homeland Security, and the like. The portion going to welfare is almost unnoticeable and certainly not worth the sky-is-fallng rhetoric that accompanies any mention of a tax hike on the wealthy.

You remember the old phrase "Hey mister, can you spare dime?" Well, after 100 years of inflation the best that can be mustered today is "Hey mister, can you spare six cents?" Says something about American society, doesn't it?