Less than 1/10th of A Second
That's how fast the government spent what you gave them last year
Less than one-tenth of one second. It only took the federal government that long to spend all of the money you paid to it in taxes last year, if you’re an average taxpayer.
Think of the sweat and hours you spent to keep bread on the table and a roof over your head in 2023, and how much of that labor was conscripted by the feds for your “fair share” of their non-stop spending orgy.
Zip! All gone in less than a heartbeat, less than an eye blink.
How does that make you feel? Do you get warm fuzzies when you visualize all that money, which is likely a significant amount on a personal scale, vaporizing like water from hot pavement—only faster?
There’s a concept called Tax Freedom Day. As calculated by the Tax Foundation, it’s the date on which the average American has earned enough money to pay off his or her total tax obligations for the year—state, local and federal. In 2019 (the latest year I could find) Tax Freedom Day was April 19.
Put another way, if every dollar you earned starting on Jan. 1 of that year went straight to taxes, April 19 would be the first day you could begin working for yourself.
That’s sobering, and enraging. But it occurred to me that someone should find out how fast the average person’s taxes are being spent.
It’s one thing to have this vague idea that the money withheld from your paycheck goes into some pot from which it is carefully portioned out—$20 as your part of building a bomb, say; $10 toward somebody’s welfare check; $15 to help keep the lights on at the White House and Congress. Etc.
It’s another to picture that money as a mere blip, vanishing the instant some government drudge enters it into a computer.
I decided I would make the calculation, focusing just on federal taxes.
Now, I wasn’t exactly a math wiz in school, and I avoided every math class after basic algebra. Take that as a disclaimer for what follows. And if someone reading this knows a better methodology or has better figures, let me know in the comments.
It turns out that calculating how fast the average person’s taxes are spent is complicated, because of the different tax brackets, the operation of the government on a fiscal rather than a calendar year, and so on.
Nevertheless, I plunged on.
First, on the official U.S. Treasury website, I found an odometer-type app showing a running total of current federal spending. At the time I checked it it said, “The U.S. government has spent $2.68 trillion in fiscal year 2024 to ensure the well-being of the people of the United States.” (Yeah, I gagged at that last bit, too.)
But I needed the figure for a whole year, and on that same page it was noted that the government spent $6.13 trillion in FY 2023; that is, Oct. 1, 2022–Sept. 30, 2023.
Written out, $6.13 trillion is $6,130,000,000,000. There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Dividing the first figure by the second one gives us $194,381.02—that’s how much the government spent per second in 2023.
Finding what the hypothetical average taxpayer coughed up for Leviathan in 2023 was somewhat harder.
A financial website called The Balance was helpful. After explaining why it’s difficult to define the average taxpayer, the author of an article on the subject writes:
“It might be easier to understand the median tax burden of American taxpayers instead. The median is the number that falls in the middle of a data set. Theoretically, half of all taxpayers would pay less than a median figure, and half would pay more.”
Okay, I’ll go with that.
The author also advises considering the whole “tax wedge,” which includes not just the direct income tax but also taxes for Social Security and Medicare, part of which, in a bit of obfuscating flimflammery, is “contributed” by the employer (only not really).
The federal tax figure, then, per The Balance:
“Assuming a median yearly salary of $53,924, a tax wedge of 28.4% works out to about $15,314.42, meaning the average worker contributed that much to the federal government.”
That was for 2021, so using an online inflation calculator, I adjusted the figures to $60,636.79 for the salary in 2023 and $17,220.85 for taxes. There may be better real-world figures out there somewhere, but as the saying goes: close enough for government work.
For my last step, I divided $17,220.85 (taxes paid by the median worker) by $194,381.02 (amount the government spent per second in 2023). Final result? Drum roll, please …
Eight-hundredths of a second (.08).
Mr. or Ms. Taxpayer: That’s how fast your “contributions”—for one whole year, remember—are shoveled out the door by the tax plantation owners in Washington.
Gone as quick as lightning, I might say, except that a lightning strike typically lasts a few seconds, and the record is 17 seconds, long enough to spend your taxes 212 times over.
What do you think? Are you getting your gone-in-a-flash money’s worth?
Fellow Substack writer Donald Jeffries is among many who think not (and I urge you to read his whole article for his breakdown of how we’ve been screwed).
However you measure it, American taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth. You want reparations? How about huge refunds to every citizen, for the decades worth of wasteful and fraudulent use of our forced contributions?
As we know, the feds are spending more and faster than ever. Even if they were to eat out 100 percent of the substance of every taxpayer in the country, it would not begin to make a dent in what the government claims “we” owe.
That debt now stands at $34 trillion, if you’re keeping score. But wait … there’s more! That figure doesn’t include the trillions that will be needed to pay the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.
No matter how much you and every other taxpayer sends to Washington, it will never be enough.
To keep the game going just a little longer, the government with its pal the Federal Reserve just prints money and borrows to make up for what taxes won’t cover.
It’s a financial death spiral. It’s a snake eating its own tail.
From my perspective, the government might as well end the income tax and abolish the IRS right now, and just keep printing and borrowing, which it’s going to do anyway. It would relieve Americans of all that record-keeping and labor filling out forms, and provide at least a temporary boost in take-home dollars.
“Temporary,” because inflation due to the mad money creation would quickly gobble up any paycheck gains from the end of withholding.
Mind you, inflation is itself a tax, the most insidious one of all. Contra idiots like Elizabeth Warren who blame inflation on businesses shrinking their bags of potato chips, it’s entirely a made-in-Washington problem. Warren should look in a mirror to find the culprit, not the grocery aisle.
I’m afraid that as we reach the end of the World’s Greatest Con, politicians in their desperation will start grabbing everything they can, even when it makes no sense, even when its result is the further ruin of people’s lives, fortunes and freedom. Thus we hear serious proposals to tax unrealized capital gains, money that doesn’t exist yet.
A libertarian acquaintance, Jacob Hornberger, recently recounted an unpleasant experience he had at the airport. It’s what he wrote about the TSA’s ability and inclination to fine insufficiently docile passengers that caught my attention:
Given that the federal government is voraciously looking for money, Americans had better get used to the fact that federal officials everywhere, including the TSA, are being tasked with plundering and looting people as much as possible. That’s what civil-asset forfeiture is all about. After all, a 34 trillion dollar federal debt (and climbing) is nothing to scoff at. The feds need money bad and they are going to be increasingly looking for unsavory ways to get it. Indeed, during the Covid crisis, the TSA was fining people $1,000 who refused to wear masks on the plane, with fines up to $3,000 for repeat offenders. The TSA collects tens of millions of dollars in fines, and the money is deposited in the federal government’s general revenues.
I figured the TSA as just one more government-enabled gaggle of small-souled power trippers and bullies, whose main threat lay in making you miss your plane (that, and maybe feeling you up a little too intimately). I knew they could call the real cops to arrest you if they deemed you dangerous. Before reading Jacob’s article I didn’t know they were authorized to slap fines (up to $14,000!) on people who get uppity with them.
“The feds need money bad and they are going to be increasingly looking for unsavory ways to get it.”
It makes sense. In fact, it seems almost inevitable, as the history of all authoritarian, debt-ridden regimes attests.
Meanwhile, pay your taxes. And enjoy knowing they will be flushed down the toilet in less than a tenth of a second.
Eight-hundredths of a second, to be precise.
Note
A user on X (formerly Twitter) called Roadtoserfdom (@roadtoserfdom3) makes an excellent point: “Because the state mints fiat currency at will, taxes have no remunerative function in terms of funding state operations. Taxes appear to serve two primary functions, to surveil financial activity and impoverish victims.”
For a deep dive on the accelerating debt train wreck, see this from David Stockman: How the US Federal Debt Has Gone Parabolic
Update, April 10: Just saw this from John Whitehead, also a good read: Tyranny by the Numbers: The Government Wants Your Money Any Way It Can Get It
Permission is given to republish this article with these provisions: 1. You must credit me, R. Stephen Smith, as the author. 2. You must include a link back to this page or to my home page.
Thanks for quoting me, R. Stephen! Great read!