TaxDay 2010
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TaxDay 2010
Michelle Mon Apr 12, 2010 6:02 am
Where Do Your Tax Dollars Go? - TaxDay 2010
SNIP:
With this publication, taxpayers can take stock of how the federal government spent each 2009 income tax dollar: from 26.5 cents for military-related spending to 13.6 cents for military and non-military interest on the debt to 2 cents for education. The publication also shows, in addition to individual income taxes, where the money came from in 2009 to pay for the federal spending.
On April 15, 2010, federal taxes are due on income earned in the 2009 calendar year. This tax day publication examines federal spending estimates for Fiscal Year 2009 (FY09).
Federal spending reflected the events of 2009: financial institutions collapsed, there was a global economic downturn, and a domestic housing crisis. These events required federal fiscal responses, among them: the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), decreased interest rates, increased unemployment insurance, and the federal housing tax credit.
In turn, this affected the proportions of federal outlays for FY09. The spending in the categories of Government (TARP), Housing & Community (housing tax credit) and Income & Labor (unemployment insurance) was relatively greater as a proportion of the total budget in FY09. As a result, the spending in other categories such as Military and Health was relatively lower as a proportion of the total budget.
It's worth noting that in FY09, individual income tax payments contributed 6.6 times more than corporate taxes to federal revenues whereas thirty years ago, individual income taxes were 3.3 times greater than corporate contributions to federal revenues. In other words, in FY09, individuals contributed $915 billion to the $2.7 trillion total federal fund outlays whereas corporations only contributed $138 billion.
See Source for complete analysis: http://www.nationalpriorities.org/taxday2010
*********************************************
Tomgram: Jo Comerford, Your Taxes and War
Posted by Jo Comerford at 6:10pm, April 11, 2010.
If you’re an average American taxpayer, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, since 2001, cost you personally $7,334, according to the “cost of war” counter created by the National Priorities Project (NPP). They have cost all Americans collectively more than $980,000,000,000. As a country, we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark soon. These are staggering figures and, despite the $72.3 billion that Congress has already ponied up for the Afghan War in 2010 ($136.8 billion if you add in Iraq), the administration is about to go back to Congress for more than $35 billion in outside-the-budget supplemental funds to cover the president’s military and civilian Afghan surges. When that passes, as it surely will, the cumulative cost of the Afghan War alone will hit $300 billion, and we’ll be heading for two trillion-dollar wars.
In the meantime, just so you know, that $300 billion, according to the NPP, could have paid for healthcare for 131,780,734 American children for a year, or for 53,872,201 students to receive Pell Grants of $5,550, or for the salaries and benefits of 4,911,552 elementary school teachers for that same year.
April 15th is almost upon us, and Jo Comerford, TomDispatch regular as well as the NPP’s executive director, decided to take a look at one restive American community under the gun (so to speak) as tax day rolls around again. Our wars seem -- and are -- so far away, so divorced from American lives. If someone you know well hasn’t been wounded or killed in one of them, it can be hard to grasp just how they are also wounding this society. Here’s one way. (Check out as well Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Comerford discusses military spending and the federal budget by clicking here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Tax Day and America’s Wars
What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing
By Jo Comerford
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s “war tax” will reach $138.6 million -- or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s “surge” in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter “where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation.”
In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s “skewed national priorities,” especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.
A Hard Hit Rust-Belt City
Like so many post-industrial rust-belt communities, Binghamton was hard hit by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, though it faired better than a number of similar cities, in part because Ryan, his administration, and the Binghamton City Council are a smart and scrappy crew. No doubt that’s why he earned the New York State Conference of Mayors Public Administration and Management award two years running.
These days, however, even the smartest and scrappiest of mayors still has to face grim reality. In July 2009, as the city began developing the 2010 budget, Ryan projected a $7 million shortfall. Contributing factors included a likely $700,000 decline in sales tax revenue, ever rising healthcare costs, increased pension contributions to replace funds lost in the market during the collapse of 2008-09, and a $500,000 drop in the return on the city's investment portfolio.
With worse times ahead, thanks in part to the projected end of federal stimulus money and a city drained dry of reserves, Ryan has had to face a classically unpalatable choice: raise city sales taxes from 7% to an unheard of 24% or cut city jobs. He chose jobs, as have the vast majority of mayors and governors across the country, eliminating 39 of them. In the process, he sought greater program efficiencies and wrestled with ways to increase city revenues while cutting ever closer to Binghamton’s proverbial bone.
It was in the context of this kind of local pain that Ryan was stunned to discover just how much of Binghamton’s taxes were going to the military and to our distant wars, and how little was coming back to Binghamton in the form of aid and services. “When I first saw the cost of war numbers and made the connections,” Ryan remarks, “I had to wonder if we're ever going to get our priorities straight as a nation. It's like we're facing an attack on government. As a mayor, I can see so clearly what increased federal spending could do for the people of my city.”
Ryan's message doesn't resonate with all of his constituents -- some have walked out on his public appearances -- but he's used to controversy and convinced that Americans had better get their heads straight soon. “People are hurting so bad,” he insists, “that, like it or not, we're all going to have to look at things seriously if we want our situation to change.”
Heads should swivel, he thinks, when faced with the $138.6 million Binghamton’s taxpayers are out of pocket since 2001 for the Iraq and Afghan wars. And that’s not even counting the city's share of the supplemental funds Congress will undoubtedly agree to this spring to cover the Afghan “surge” or the city's portion of the basic Pentagon budget for the same period.
For a small city with an annual budget of $81.1 million, $138.6 million would be a hefty sum, even in non-recessionary times. For the same amount of money, Ryan could fund the Binghamton city library for the next 60 years, or pay for a four-year education for 95% of the incoming freshman class at the State University of New York at Binghamton, or offer four years of quality health coverage for everyone in Binghamton 19 or younger, or secure renewable electricity for every home in the city for the next 11 years. If he was feeling really flush, he could fully fund one-third of New York State's Head Start slots for one year.
For the same sum, Ryan could also authorize a $2,900 tax refund for every woman, man, and child in Binghamton or pay the salaries of all of Binghamton's hard-hit public school teachers and staff for about two years.
For $138.6 million, Mayor Ryan could hire 2,765 public safety officers for a year, or simply refund the 12 police positions cut in the latest budget contraction and guarantee those salaries for the next 230 years. Ridiculous? These days, no one is laughing in Binghamton or other cities like it.
A Community Starved by War
As tax day looms on April 15th, Ryan increasingly thinks about where Binghamton’s tax dollars will be heading and dreams about a government system that would have the potential to raise and spend tax revenue in the service of social benefits like affordable healthcare.
He’s disturbed by how Binghamton’s tax dollars will be distributed and what they will -- and won't -- buy for his city. Consider, for instance, where the 2009 taxes paid by a median income Binghamton household actually went. That year, such a household's income hovered around $30,000 annually, while its members paid approximately $738 in federal income taxes.
According to the tax-day analysis of the National Priorities Project (NPP), an overwhelming 218 of those dollars went to pay for military expenditures and interest on military-related debt (generated, in part, by current war spending). The next highest amount -- $137 -- went to healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
In 2009, $67, nearly 10 cents on every tax dollar, went to an aggregated category of spending NPP has titled “government,” tripling it in a single year, largely thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the bank bailout, whose cost every community in America has had to shoulder. Fifty-eight dollars (8.5 cents on every income-tax dollar) went to increased unemployment insurance payments and job-training initiatives, also a rise from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, the $15 that went to elementary, secondary, higher, and vocational education in 2009 represented a drop from 2008, a loss of a penny on every tax dollar. There’s no way, of course, that Mayor Ryan's dream of free, quality education from kindergarten to college is likely to happen on but 2% of every individual federal income tax dollar. Nor will we usher in the green techno-revolution that he and President Obama both support, by spending 2.5 cents on every dollar for the combined categories of the environment, energy, and science, and another 1.3 cents of every dollar on transportation.
“It's a double whammy," Ryan says. "We have a revenue problem and a values and priorities problem in this nation.”
Some desperate city leaders have suggested that the Mayor cut workers' pensions to help close the city’s budget gap. Matt Ryan doesn't see that as a solution to anything. “I have secretaries making $25,000 or $30,000. I'm not about to cut their net, such as it is. We have to think long haul. We have to look at fundamental changes if we're going to make it as a country. We should all be talking about this -- all the time.”
A construction crew will soon arrive to install Binghamton's “cost of war” counter which will overlook the city's busiest intersection and spur conversation around tax day. During the three minutes local motorists wait at the nearby traffic light, they can join Mayor Ryan in waving good-bye to $100. And Binghamton as a whole can grapple with spending $49,650 in war costs every day of 2010.
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts. To look at the NPP's, cost of war counter, click here; for its budget analysis, click here; and for its state-level jobs analysis, click here. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Comerford discusses military spending and the federal budget, click here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.
Copyright 2010 Jo Comerford
Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175231/tomgram%3A_jo_comerford%2C_your_taxes_and_war/#more
SNIP:
With this publication, taxpayers can take stock of how the federal government spent each 2009 income tax dollar: from 26.5 cents for military-related spending to 13.6 cents for military and non-military interest on the debt to 2 cents for education. The publication also shows, in addition to individual income taxes, where the money came from in 2009 to pay for the federal spending.
On April 15, 2010, federal taxes are due on income earned in the 2009 calendar year. This tax day publication examines federal spending estimates for Fiscal Year 2009 (FY09).
Federal spending reflected the events of 2009: financial institutions collapsed, there was a global economic downturn, and a domestic housing crisis. These events required federal fiscal responses, among them: the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), decreased interest rates, increased unemployment insurance, and the federal housing tax credit.
In turn, this affected the proportions of federal outlays for FY09. The spending in the categories of Government (TARP), Housing & Community (housing tax credit) and Income & Labor (unemployment insurance) was relatively greater as a proportion of the total budget in FY09. As a result, the spending in other categories such as Military and Health was relatively lower as a proportion of the total budget.
It's worth noting that in FY09, individual income tax payments contributed 6.6 times more than corporate taxes to federal revenues whereas thirty years ago, individual income taxes were 3.3 times greater than corporate contributions to federal revenues. In other words, in FY09, individuals contributed $915 billion to the $2.7 trillion total federal fund outlays whereas corporations only contributed $138 billion.
See Source for complete analysis: http://www.nationalpriorities.org/taxday2010
*********************************************
Tomgram: Jo Comerford, Your Taxes and War
Posted by Jo Comerford at 6:10pm, April 11, 2010.
If you’re an average American taxpayer, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, since 2001, cost you personally $7,334, according to the “cost of war” counter created by the National Priorities Project (NPP). They have cost all Americans collectively more than $980,000,000,000. As a country, we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark soon. These are staggering figures and, despite the $72.3 billion that Congress has already ponied up for the Afghan War in 2010 ($136.8 billion if you add in Iraq), the administration is about to go back to Congress for more than $35 billion in outside-the-budget supplemental funds to cover the president’s military and civilian Afghan surges. When that passes, as it surely will, the cumulative cost of the Afghan War alone will hit $300 billion, and we’ll be heading for two trillion-dollar wars.
In the meantime, just so you know, that $300 billion, according to the NPP, could have paid for healthcare for 131,780,734 American children for a year, or for 53,872,201 students to receive Pell Grants of $5,550, or for the salaries and benefits of 4,911,552 elementary school teachers for that same year.
April 15th is almost upon us, and Jo Comerford, TomDispatch regular as well as the NPP’s executive director, decided to take a look at one restive American community under the gun (so to speak) as tax day rolls around again. Our wars seem -- and are -- so far away, so divorced from American lives. If someone you know well hasn’t been wounded or killed in one of them, it can be hard to grasp just how they are also wounding this society. Here’s one way. (Check out as well Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Comerford discusses military spending and the federal budget by clicking here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Tax Day and America’s Wars
What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing
By Jo Comerford
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s “war tax” will reach $138.6 million -- or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s “surge” in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter “where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation.”
In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s “skewed national priorities,” especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.
A Hard Hit Rust-Belt City
Like so many post-industrial rust-belt communities, Binghamton was hard hit by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, though it faired better than a number of similar cities, in part because Ryan, his administration, and the Binghamton City Council are a smart and scrappy crew. No doubt that’s why he earned the New York State Conference of Mayors Public Administration and Management award two years running.
These days, however, even the smartest and scrappiest of mayors still has to face grim reality. In July 2009, as the city began developing the 2010 budget, Ryan projected a $7 million shortfall. Contributing factors included a likely $700,000 decline in sales tax revenue, ever rising healthcare costs, increased pension contributions to replace funds lost in the market during the collapse of 2008-09, and a $500,000 drop in the return on the city's investment portfolio.
With worse times ahead, thanks in part to the projected end of federal stimulus money and a city drained dry of reserves, Ryan has had to face a classically unpalatable choice: raise city sales taxes from 7% to an unheard of 24% or cut city jobs. He chose jobs, as have the vast majority of mayors and governors across the country, eliminating 39 of them. In the process, he sought greater program efficiencies and wrestled with ways to increase city revenues while cutting ever closer to Binghamton’s proverbial bone.
It was in the context of this kind of local pain that Ryan was stunned to discover just how much of Binghamton’s taxes were going to the military and to our distant wars, and how little was coming back to Binghamton in the form of aid and services. “When I first saw the cost of war numbers and made the connections,” Ryan remarks, “I had to wonder if we're ever going to get our priorities straight as a nation. It's like we're facing an attack on government. As a mayor, I can see so clearly what increased federal spending could do for the people of my city.”
Ryan's message doesn't resonate with all of his constituents -- some have walked out on his public appearances -- but he's used to controversy and convinced that Americans had better get their heads straight soon. “People are hurting so bad,” he insists, “that, like it or not, we're all going to have to look at things seriously if we want our situation to change.”
Heads should swivel, he thinks, when faced with the $138.6 million Binghamton’s taxpayers are out of pocket since 2001 for the Iraq and Afghan wars. And that’s not even counting the city's share of the supplemental funds Congress will undoubtedly agree to this spring to cover the Afghan “surge” or the city's portion of the basic Pentagon budget for the same period.
For a small city with an annual budget of $81.1 million, $138.6 million would be a hefty sum, even in non-recessionary times. For the same amount of money, Ryan could fund the Binghamton city library for the next 60 years, or pay for a four-year education for 95% of the incoming freshman class at the State University of New York at Binghamton, or offer four years of quality health coverage for everyone in Binghamton 19 or younger, or secure renewable electricity for every home in the city for the next 11 years. If he was feeling really flush, he could fully fund one-third of New York State's Head Start slots for one year.
For the same sum, Ryan could also authorize a $2,900 tax refund for every woman, man, and child in Binghamton or pay the salaries of all of Binghamton's hard-hit public school teachers and staff for about two years.
For $138.6 million, Mayor Ryan could hire 2,765 public safety officers for a year, or simply refund the 12 police positions cut in the latest budget contraction and guarantee those salaries for the next 230 years. Ridiculous? These days, no one is laughing in Binghamton or other cities like it.
A Community Starved by War
As tax day looms on April 15th, Ryan increasingly thinks about where Binghamton’s tax dollars will be heading and dreams about a government system that would have the potential to raise and spend tax revenue in the service of social benefits like affordable healthcare.
He’s disturbed by how Binghamton’s tax dollars will be distributed and what they will -- and won't -- buy for his city. Consider, for instance, where the 2009 taxes paid by a median income Binghamton household actually went. That year, such a household's income hovered around $30,000 annually, while its members paid approximately $738 in federal income taxes.
According to the tax-day analysis of the National Priorities Project (NPP), an overwhelming 218 of those dollars went to pay for military expenditures and interest on military-related debt (generated, in part, by current war spending). The next highest amount -- $137 -- went to healthcare, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
In 2009, $67, nearly 10 cents on every tax dollar, went to an aggregated category of spending NPP has titled “government,” tripling it in a single year, largely thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the bank bailout, whose cost every community in America has had to shoulder. Fifty-eight dollars (8.5 cents on every income-tax dollar) went to increased unemployment insurance payments and job-training initiatives, also a rise from the previous year.
Not surprisingly, the $15 that went to elementary, secondary, higher, and vocational education in 2009 represented a drop from 2008, a loss of a penny on every tax dollar. There’s no way, of course, that Mayor Ryan's dream of free, quality education from kindergarten to college is likely to happen on but 2% of every individual federal income tax dollar. Nor will we usher in the green techno-revolution that he and President Obama both support, by spending 2.5 cents on every dollar for the combined categories of the environment, energy, and science, and another 1.3 cents of every dollar on transportation.
“It's a double whammy," Ryan says. "We have a revenue problem and a values and priorities problem in this nation.”
Some desperate city leaders have suggested that the Mayor cut workers' pensions to help close the city’s budget gap. Matt Ryan doesn't see that as a solution to anything. “I have secretaries making $25,000 or $30,000. I'm not about to cut their net, such as it is. We have to think long haul. We have to look at fundamental changes if we're going to make it as a country. We should all be talking about this -- all the time.”
A construction crew will soon arrive to install Binghamton's “cost of war” counter which will overlook the city's busiest intersection and spur conversation around tax day. During the three minutes local motorists wait at the nearby traffic light, they can join Mayor Ryan in waving good-bye to $100. And Binghamton as a whole can grapple with spending $49,650 in war costs every day of 2010.
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts. To look at the NPP's, cost of war counter, click here; for its budget analysis, click here; and for its state-level jobs analysis, click here. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Comerford discusses military spending and the federal budget, click here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.
Copyright 2010 Jo Comerford
Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175231/tomgram%3A_jo_comerford%2C_your_taxes_and_war/#more
Michelle- Posts : 2
Join date : 2010-04-08
Yes this tax thing is the craziest illusion
Admin Fri Apr 16, 2010 6:01 pm
This tax thing is the craziest illusion that everyone is terrorized into participating. Unbelievable, not enough people are aware of the depth of the scam and so the numbers are too few to stand up against this imposition collectively. Everyone is scared of the consequences. what is even crazier is that the system gets us to pay for our own enslavement. the funds are used to support all kinds of atrocities that the individual might not so readily agree to. Now the census...scaring people into participating. Yup!
Admin- Admin
- Posts : 26
Join date : 2009-03-08
Location : Los Angeles, CA -
another way
Brian Thu Jun 17, 2010 12:11 pm
It is possible to individually and legally file a tax return in a "sovereign" way. I have done this. It is true that there is a menace that looms, a conditioning about our obligation to pony up and the consequences of not complying. We police ourselves with this fear. I had a number of troubled moments, feeling vulnerable and alone, before I went ahead and stood up for my earnings. The tax code uses extremely deceptive language. It's like Alice in Wonderland, the way terms are defined very specifically within the context of taxation - words that we assume we know, but are not at all what we think they are. Words like "employee" and "income" mean not what we commonly think when used in the tax code. It seems that it is best to satisfy the terms of the game by filing a return, giving them their paperwork, jumping through the bureaucratic hoops, but calculating the monetary amounts on your own terms (the math is extremely simple). They need their documents. Their forms. Give them their paper in order to get what is yours. In a way it's like a big dumb machine. The IRS is a program itself. Input and output according to algorithms. If you put in the right data in the proper sequence you get the result you want. We have been collectively led astray to the point that we now assume there is only one way to input the data. We think all of our deductions are so very smart, hiring experts to calculate these for us. It's deceptive bait. The game is made so complicated that we are overwhelmed, and subsequently tricked into believing in its reality by the sheer magnitude of its byzantine structure, which when seen from the right perspective is just the emperor's new clothes.
Brian- Posts : 1
Join date : 2010-06-17
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