Contact the Center
for Informed Citizen Action at 233-1429.
Because April
15 falls on a Saturday this year, Tax Day 2000 is April
17
.
Taxes are the lifeblood of every government, and as the
dread day approaches for the national collective leeching,
we've been wondering exactly how those vamp--uh, representatives
in Congress, the Statehouse and the county building have
been spending all our hard-earned cash.
Now a Portland think tank named the Center for Informed
Citizen Action has issued an innovative report showing
how long--in days, hours and minutes--a typical Oregon
family toiled to support government spending on everything
from playgrounds to battleships.
The report examines a family of four earning $54,000
a year, close to the Oregon average. The family waved
goodbye to $13,549--almost exactly 25 percent of their
income--in income tax, payroll tax, property tax and gas
tax. To pay all those taxes, the average four-person family
worked 64 days, 1 hour, 51 minutes and 8 seconds.
CICA then added up federal, state and local government
spending on specific categories (schools, for example,
receive money from all three levels of government) to
figure out how long the average Oregonian worked to support
each one.
The results can hardly be described as shocking, but
they make a fascinating counterpoint to the overheated
election-year rhetoric about wasteful government social
programs. For example, last year the average family worked
for six days, one hour, and 45 minutes to support the
gleaming hardware and brass buttons at the Pentagon (total
expenditure: $275 billion), but just five hours for the
government program known as Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families--a.k.a. welfare (total expenditure: $14 billion).
Similarly, the family labored for two days, four hours
and five minutes to support transportation, 95 percent
of which goes to build traffic lights, widen intersections
and pave the prairies for their new SUV--but just three
hours and 37 minutes on farm subsidies.
"Many of the popular programs are fairly expensive,"
said CICA Board President Jim Whitty. "That's a fact that
you rarely hear from either political party. Republicans
don't like to acknowledge the fact that those evil taxes
are mostly going to popular programs. And Democrats are
skittish about the fact that those popular programs are
pretty darned expensive."
CICA Executive Director Steve Novick, a Portland lawyer
and anti-Sizemore activist, hoped taxpayers would be pleased
with at least some of the news in the report. "I'd guess
people will be glad to know that they spent less than
an hour and a half's worth of wages paying for the existence
of the IRS," he says.
The chart that follows shows state and federal income
taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, property
taxes, gas taxes and lottery money (which is technically
a voluntary tax, but CICA decided to include it anyway).
Some categories need explanation:
PUBLIC SAFETY includes spending on police, fire,
prisons, jails and courts.
OREGON HEALTH PLAN includes spending for impoverished
mentally ill and developmentally disabled people.
INTEREST ON DEBT includes money the federal government
spent financing the federal debt.
DEBT REDUCTION includes money the federal government
spent reducing the federal debt.
VETERANS includes benefits and services to veterans,
not to be confused with military retirement, which is
a separate category.
NATURAL RESOURCES includes environmental protection,
parks, pollution control and abatement, etc.
(SOURCE:
CENTER FOR INFORMED CITIZEN ACTION, BASED ON STATISTICS
FROM THE OREGON LEGISLATIVE REVENUE OFFICE AND THE BUDGET
OF THE UNITED STATES.)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published April 12,
2000
