It’s painfully obvious that most people are completely ignorant about not just taxation but also basic facts about where your tax money goes. This is particularly galling, since we live in an age of Miracles and Wonders where such answers are seconds away with any web browser.

Most Heathen understand how tax brackets work, of course, but I thought it might be useful to link to this rundown of where tax dollars actually go, from the folks at NPR’s Planet Money (which is in general very, very worth your time).

In the linked post, the PM guys provide a hypothetical receipt for a taxpayer who earned $34,140 and paid $5,400 in Federal taxes and FICA.

By far the largest chunks are Social Security (about 19% of the tax bill), Medicare (12%), and Medicaid (7%). Next up is interest on the national debt (5%), the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (4%). Where’s foreign aid? 0.8%. NASA? Half a percent.

Oh, and arts funding? Only 24 cents of this tax bill, which is a whopping 0.004%. Click through; it’s interesting — plus, it’s just plain responsible to have some notion of the relative sizes of the various Federal obligations.