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Comment by jsdalton | Hacker News Reader

Direct link to the White House's receipt calculator: http://www.whitehouse.gov/taxreceipt

They should really send taxpayers a copy of this in the mail though.

I doubt many of the people who are raging about how we can balance the budget by cutting foreign aid and NPR are going to bother going to a website and rooting around for line items on their W2 and tax return.

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I think your confusing multiple issues - the people wanting to cut foreign aid and NPR have a different vision of what government is for, and when it is ok to use force, e.g. they don't think it's ok for someone to threaten to kill them to pay for NPR.

I'm a fan of NPR and I don't think it should be funded by the government- the government pays less than 5% of NPR's budget, but adds tons conflict.

Yes, there are multiple issues: one of which is whether or not the government should be paying for NPR and foreign aid at all. But, what I think the original poster was responding to, and what the main purpose of the "receipt" is, is that most (or at at least very many) people don't know how government spending is apportioned.

I'll agree with that, people don't realize how much stuff costs. Like NASA (17.6 Billion[1]) vs Department of Education (71 Billion[2])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Edu...

Right, but the receipt does very little to fix this. Two of the largest categories of spending are completely obfuscated by it.

I wasn't aware anyone had their life threatened because they didn't pay for NPR.

Try not paying the portion of your taxes represented by NPR. You'll soon enough have your door kicked down, your property seized, and you'll find your way to prison.

EVERYTHING the state does is explicitly backed by the government's monopoly on violence.

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