Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Education, Military, Money, TaxesNational Priorities Project has a great website that illustrates how your money is spent by the federal government on a state by state average. (note: this doesn’t mean state tax dollars are being spent, just the average breakdown for federal taxes paid by residents of a certain state.)
The biggest finding? For every $42 we spend on the military, we spend $4.40 on education. Not only that, the debt we pay on the money we borrow to spend on the military makes up nearly 1/4th of the $42, or $10.
So the reality is where we’re spending more than 2 times on military debt than we do on our education system.
Something is wrong here folks.
Here’s the breakdown from Missouri (pdf), my home state:
The median income family in Missouri paid $1,689 in federal income taxes in 2007. Here is how that money was spent:
- Military: $713
- Health: $373
- Interest on Non-military Debt: $173
- Anti-Poverty Programs: $146
- Education, Training & Social Services: $74
- Government & Law Enforcement: $66
- Housing & Community Development: $56
- Environment, Energy & Science: $45
- Transportation, Commerce & Agriculture: $26
- International Affairs: $17
And here’s that info presented for our more visual readers…
I want it to be very clear that I think national defense is important and it needs a healthy budget, but, again, it’s nuts that the debt on our military spending is more than 2 times the amount we spend on education.
I guess the question then is why aren’t we worried that our people aren’t as advanced as our weapons systems? And yes, I’m talking about equivalence here…don’t go too far down the rabbit hole on dissecting this comparison please.
Listen, there’s no doubt we’ve been steadily slipping behind in education when compared with the rest of the world, and it’s obvious that even though people say throwing money at the problem won’t solve it, the money we’re currently spending on it just isn’t enough. Teachers are woefully underpaid and if we expect our kids to do better in school just because they have to study for NCLB tests, we’re fooling ourselves. Unfunded mandates haven’t worked, and giving parents choices to use vouchers won’t come anywhere close to fixing systemic problems.
So what I’m advocating is we tighten our belts on the military spending and try to get closer to parity on some of these categories…especially education. We have the best military in the world, so why not refocus on education and make sure we have the best people in the world too? We can’t let globalization and outsourcing lull us into a false sense of security that hiring the best and brightest from around the world will be the way we continue to be tops in innovation. There are still very real barriers to the “global workplace” and for that reason alone we should make sure our people get more attention and money directed at them.
It’s only fair.
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April 9th, 2008 at 11:48 am
How do you know this?
If you look on Wikipedia, they claim that Medicare and Medicaid together are about 4% points higher than Defense. Also, this is Federal money, most of the money for schools comes from state budgets, whereas state taxes don’t fund military operations.
Considering that Americans generally are still better educated than almost any other country in the world, my guess is that it simply costs more to defend the entire free world than to educate children. We can still do better, of course.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Dare we hope that any “belt tightening” on the military will be cutting back on fancy (and super-expensive) new toys? As opposed to cutting back on maintenance of the stuff we already have, and things that actually make a difference for the troops in the field? Unfortunately, if history is any guide, it won’t happen that way.
I’m not faulting some of the real advances that have been made in military technology. I’m faulting the new for the sake of being new. And the resulting failure to keep up what we already ahve that works.
In many ways, it’s the same problem that we have with education. We get so carried away with new ideas that we cut back on teaching techniques that have worked for a long time. And end up with kids who learn to read less well than their parents and grandparents did. Ditto math. We built an educational system that was the envy of the world. Then we got carried away with innovation for its own sake, and let it go into terminal decline.
Fixing it will take a lot of getting back to basics. But I fear that what we will get is fancy new systems which don’t actually work — but do cost a lot.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I was not aware that it was the job of the federal government to provide education dollars for the children of Missouri. Don’t you think you are being somewhat deceptive with this post. What about all of the state and property tax dollars spent for education in Missouri?
How much of the Missouri state budget is spent on national defense? I think we are confusing the roles of the federal and state governments here. If you want to compare defense spending to education spending, fine. But compare apples to apples.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
No, what this is saying is you live in X state, your average tax federal tax is $X. Out of that amount, the site shows you how much of it goes for what. It doesn’t come out of state tax.
I’ll revise the post so it’s clearer.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
How I came to this conclusion is pretty straightforward.
The problem is access to good education, yes, but private schools can’t handle all of the kids in America. The systemic problem I’m talking about is the amount of good education. And again, vouchers won’t solve that situation.
Also, vouchers take money away from failing schools. How will they ever get better? I’d like to hear an answer for this one.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Justin, I’m pretty sure that the point that PDX was making is that in order to compare apples to apples, you’d have to factor in all of the local and state tax dollars that go toward education. You are making claims about education spending that just aren’t true; you’re comparing the amount of military expenditure by the fed govt to the amount of education expenditure by the fed govt (not the overall amounts that taxpayers pay to both categories. I’d actually prefer that the federal spending on education be reduced and that responsibility be reverted back more to the local level, because I think that we’ve made our education system worse instead of better with every dollar that leaves the states and travels through layers of beaurocracy before returning to the school districts.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
You add value to schools by introducing competition into the system. Bad schools should go bankrupt. Bad teachers should be fired. Good schools and good teachers should make lots of money. Poorly managed businesses never successed by merely an infusion of capital, people just end up losing their money.
My children go to private school and I am very satisfied with the education that they are recieving. The school knows that I, and most of the parents, will find another place to educate our children if their job performance is lacking. End of story. I can afford to and will pay to ensure that my kids have a high quality education.
It is unfortunate that Justin disagrees with allowing lower-income parents the opportunity to send their children to schools that have to compete. Justin asks an interesting questions, don’t vouchers take money away from bad schools and how will these schools improve if they don’t have the money. See where the emphasis is: On the public school, NOT on the children.
Justin, (since we both stem from KCMO) if you were a low-income parent and you had to send your kid to one of the notoriously horrendous KC public schools, wouldn’t you die for an opportunity to send your kid to St. Theresa’s or Notre Dame Sion or just about any other place. When you are a parent, I guarentee, your concern is not for the abstract “systemic problem”, but for the very real issue of educating your child.
Some people just don’t get it…it’s about the children, not the schools.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Dos - I don’t believe it’s a question of good or bad schools, or the children - of course anyone that wants a decent society expects their children to be as well educated as possible.
The “offense” budget of the United States equates to roughly 47% of all the defense expenditures in the world (it’s probably even more than that now since these percentatges are a few years old) - that is a huge problem. When we borrow more than twice the amount we spend on education every year in order to fund bullets that is also a huge problem. No society can sustain that level of paranoia, and ridiculous military spending.
The point of Justins’ post sheds light on a massive problem in our society. It isn’t education or education expense or the failure of schools - it’s the exceedingly f’d up priorities in our society - and sadly they are crushing us - but people are so de-sensitized to it they won’t stand up and say “enough is enough”. Many Americans think it’s OK that we spend more than the next 10 countries combined on National offense - and that we borrow atleast 25% of that number every year from the Chinese. Our nation borrows over $100 billion per year from what arguably is an enemy, so that we can buy more “stuff” from them – does that make sense to you? Meanwhile, many of children aren’t properly educated, we don’t have the money to invest in new infrastructure such as streets, water mains, water and sewage processing, national fiber optic infrastructure, food safety, renewable energy, I can go on and on – but we are not investing for long term survival in this country – I wonder if that’s because the “rapture” crowd have been in power too long?
I am happy for you that you have the means and opportunities to send your children to good schools………….but millions of people are not in your position. That is societies problem……..the larger the percentage of under educated people there are that translates to a less vibrant economy, which translates to smaller tax base, which translates to less services, which perpetuates the cycle more and more. I believe that people are put on this earth to help each other “up” - not to keep each other down. A lot of Americans used to believe that – I think we need to start believing that again.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
“Americans celebrated the end of the Cold War with a mixture of relief and satisfaction. The people of the United States hoped to enjoy a peace dividend, as U.S. spending on national security was cut following the end of the Soviet military threat.”
—The 9/11 Commission Report
April 9th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
C Stanley
Your interpretation of my posting is exactly right. Funding of the military is the province of the Feds. FUnding of education lays primarily with state and local governments.
To make any assumptions regarding the priorities of our country, one must look at all monies spent on defense and education.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Christine et al are right. The states don’t spend ANY money on the military, while the states are the primary financiers of public education. What does this mean? For one thing, it means that any discussion of “national priorities (such as the web site purports to care about) needs to begin by delving further into what sorts of things are fed preropatives and which are the primary prerogatives of the states. That the feds do not spend a lot of money on area x is not necessarily a reflection of it being something that is not a priority. Generally, states WANT to have the kind of say over what they do with education that they get when they are primary financiers. Would every state love more money? Of course. Do they yearn for the additional oversight that would come with it? Of course not.
I’ll do a FWIW-only back of the envelope stab at an apples to apples comparison. The US mil budget figure I found was about $575 billion, which at 300 million americans works out to just under $2000 per American for defense.
The NEA says the average expenditure per public school student ranges from a high of some 13k per year to a low of less than 4k per year. Most of these figures are over 6 or 7 k, so I’m going to ballpark out the average at a fairly arbitrary 8k. If someone find a better figure let me know.
Anyway, using such a measure, we find that America spends about 2k per american for defense, and 8k per student. now that’s 4 times more, but is it apples to apples? What if we compare the “cost per American” for both? The figure I found was 51 million public school students, so give or take, you’d divide the cost per student by 6 and get just over $1300 per American for government expenditures to fund public schools. Now it looks like our combined US government systems spend 3 mil dollars for every ed dollar. But there are plenty of objections to that. [Personally, I'd submit that the previous per american military to per-student comparison makes more sense, but I'm not that interested in debating it.]
But is either of them apples to apples when it comes to “national priorities?” Doesn’t private ed spending reflect the priorities of Americans too?