We have tried to be as accurate as possible when calculating and estimating these values, but it was necessary to make some assumptions. If you have any comments, concerns, or improvements, please contact us through the feedback form below.

For data, we are using the actual 2007 budget numbers, provided by the GPO Access website. To calculate the estimated taxes paid by an average taxpayer, we estimated, based on the available data, that 85% of the budget is provided through individual federal taxes. We estimated approximately 199,000,000 taxpayers by summing the number of returns filed and the number of joint returns. We took 85% of the total budget, divided by the number of taxpayers, and calculated that each taxpayer paid a yearly $12230 in taxes. Based on the breakdown of the budget, we approximated that $2959 goes to Social Security, $1934 goes to Medicare, and we assumed that the rest is distributed proportionally throughout the rest of the budget.

To determine what percentage of your tax dollars went to each budget item, we calculated the percentage of the total budget spent on that item, and then assumed an equivalent percentage of your taxes were spent on that item. You may also notice that we multiplied the Social Security and Medicare numbers you provided by 2 - this is to incorporate the identical amount that an employer pays on behalf of employees; we have assumed that if this tax wasn't required, this money would likely go to the employees, so it is equivalent to a tax paid by the taxpayer.

Other notes: Although the federal budget is in effect from October 1^st through September 30^th, we have assumed for convenience that a fiscal budget year is equivalent to a calendar year (over which time federal taxes are collected and reported).

Also, there are a number of items in the federal budget that have a negative value - we decided to keep these visible in the tool, as they are part of the budget. Since these are not funded through individual tax contributions, however, we did not provide a value in the taxpayer's column.

Source websites:

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy09/fct.html
http://www.irs.gov
http://www.askquestions.org/

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