Editorial: Your tax dollars at work

With the tax filing deadline mercifully behind us, wouldn't it be nice to know what all those hard-earned dollars you personally sent to Washington will actually buy? Now you can.

The White House has launched a "taxpayer receipt" -- a calculator available online at www.whitehouse.gov/taxreceipt -- that allows anyone to plug in the amounts they paid in income and payroll taxes and get a breakdown of where every dollar will be spent.

While many Long Island families make more, assume, for the sake of illustration, that a family of two adults and two kids has an income of $80,000. They would pay $4,960 for Social Security and $1,160 for Medicare.

If that couple didn't itemize, saved 5 percent of their income in a tax-deferred 401(k) and claimed the making work pay and child tax credits, it would pay another $3,863 in federal income tax; $1,015.97 of that would go for national defense, and $938.71 for health care -- together accounting for half the income tax they paid.

The rest would cover things such as the $158.38 tab for veterans' benefits; $77.26 for immigration, law enforcement and the administration of justice; $185.42 for education and job training; and $15.45 to respond to natural disasters. Interest on the debt would claim $285.86.

Real world numbers help make sense of the otherworldly billion and trillion dollar figures being thrown around in Washington. And when debating deficits, taxes and spending, the essential ingredient in shortest supply isn't dollars. It's clarity. hN