I was thinking about this recently when I filed my taxes.
Maybe if they provided some kind of itemized receipt? "You paid $x in taxes. This was distributed as $y to infrastructure, $z to education, $w to defense" etc.
Maybe if they provided some kind of itemized receipt? "You paid $x in taxes. This was distributed as $y to infrastructure, $z to education, $w to defense" etc.
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
Even if you just look at discretionary spending, debt payments are not a large portion of spending.
New borrowing is also larger than the interest payments.
Simple calculation:
With $20T of debt, at 3% interest rate (30Y bond), the interest on the debt is adding 600 billion dollars to the deficit per year (and it compounds).
600 billion with respect to the 3.8 billion federal budget is almost 16%.
And the interest rate is so low only because debt rates have been artificially suppressed by central banks using financial tricks such QE, the Fed buying its own's governments' debt, etc.
With interest rates bound to rise sooner or later, we are sitting on a financial time bomb.
So we save $30 billion by using the slightly smaller debt and $120 billion by using the interest rate of 2.4%.
$450 billion is still a huge budget item and it is a problem that interest rates will rise.
But you don't pay for the national debt, mostly. Recent payments on the national debt are around $420 billion - about 11% of the federal budget. God knows that's not small, but it's far from 'mostly', and 2/3 of the debt is even held inside the US.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29898083
The story contains an image of what they provide, as well as some suggestions for making it better.