An interesting website on civic responsibility

A lefty group called The Third Way has created something called Your Federal Tax Receipt.  It allows you to enter the taxes you paid in 2010 (or will pay) and then computes your share of all the budget categories.   The chart at the right shows some of the calculations for my federal taxes paid this year.  (The red line items are the top ten of the ones I chose.)  Obviously people with a bit more comfort in federal spending would choose different categories and come to different conclusions.

This list is admittedly arbitrary and the classifications at the top are not necessarily fixed.  But it begins to tell me about the priorities that our elected officials have made for our budget in a way that is tangible.  

With this information I can begin to ask some basic questions.  First, are these expenditures worth it?   In many cases, I think they are not.  Last year my taxes spent $15 on CPB and the National Endowments - were I setting the budget, I would save the $15.  Second, it helps understand priorities. I spent almost $5000 on Medicaid (not counting the state matching contributions which are bankrupting many states) was this a good use of my money?   Was it worth it to me to have almost $100 a year spent on the TSA (that does not count all the other fees and taxes I pay to travel by air)?   Could the almost $13,000 I spent on Social Security could have been better utilized?

The most interesting and disturbing numbers that came out of this exercise are ones that are constant.  The first, how much each American is in hock for past and current deficits ($48,382).  The second, how much this total went up from last year ($5,768).