Obama Administration Launches Simple Tool to Tell You How Your Tax Dollars Spent, Citizens respond with disgust

Here’s the tool.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama promised that this year, for the first time ever, American taxpayers would be able to go online and see exactly how their federal tax dollars are spent. Just enter a few pieces of information about your taxes, and the taxpayer receipt will give you a breakdown of how your tax dollars are spent on priorities like education, veterans benefits, or health care.

Give it a whirl. There is widespread ignorance about tax dollars, spending priorities, and their relative size.

The one I am going to point to, just real quick (and I’ll be coming back to this theme over the next month or so until it gets sorted out or the U.S. is screwed for the foreseeable future) is this line item. It’s at the bottom.

Net Interest 7.4%

That’s the one they are talking about “cutting” when they mention “not raising the debt ceiling.” Which is to say, not raising the debt ceiling is the same thing as cutting spending on our interest payments.

For anyone who has a credit card, car loan, mortgage, etc….you know how bad this is, right? When you miss payments on your loans, your rate goes up. It’s that simple. So when people start talking about not raising the debt ceiling, that’s what they want to do, skip payments on our debt.

Here’s what happens when that happens immediately (even if we only screw around for a few days), the rate on our debt goes up by at least 1% overnight. Recall that there are only 100 percents in anything. There’s only 100 percents of the Universe in the entire Universe. 1 percent is big deal, especially for big things…like the U.S. debt.

If the debt stands at $15,000,000,000,000 (rounded to $15T for ease) and we skip a payment (i.e. not raise the debt ceiling) it’s going to cost us at least $150,000,000,000/year. That’s $150 Billion dollars a year. That’s what our “missed payment fee” is going to translate to. For doing nothing other than missing a payment. Which would make your 2011 tax receipt include something like this line.

Net Interest 8.5%

And then we might very well be off to the races. Currently it looks like the odds of the debt ceiling being raised are about 50/50. With the way the House is doing things…well….that’s why it’s 50/50. Who knows what these idjuts will do.

Final note…that disgust I mentioned in the title is on the USA Today boards. I don’t think many who posted actually read the article past the first five words in the headline…”White House Launches New Tax”…they missed “Calculator”. It’s kinda hilarious…in a sad, sad, way.