Not paying Paul

I was looking for data on a whole series of years. This first graph, for the year 2010 only, is better than nothing. From the Tax Policy Center:

Oh, now wait...What is that OMB Budget Historicals thing at the bottom of the graph?

Oh yeah, Historical Tables, a page of links to Excel files. Oh yeah.

I took Table 2.2—Percentage Composition of Receipts by Source: 1934–2020, from whitehouse dot gov. Your tax dollars at work.

Thank you very much. I threw a graph together:

Graph #2: Stacked Graph Comparing Federal Revenue by Source

The purple fringe across the top is "other". The green, low-hanging fringe is "excise" taxes, something they just cut out of you, evidently. Taken together, the green and purple provided a pretty substantial portion of Federal revenue in the mid-1930s. You've probably heard that story as "protectionism" during the Great Depression.

But it makes me wonder how "excise and other" looked for a hundred years or so before the mid-1930s.

The fringe on the bottom, that bluegrass, that's revenue from corporate income taxes. We looked at that yesterday.

Everything else is taxes on labor. Well, on whatever you get your income from. Labor or profit or rent or interest, whatever. Mostly on labor, I'll venture. The orange is individual income taxes. The yellow is Social Security and stuff. It all comes out of your paycheck.

I did a little digging, to check that. Found a link to a spreadsheet that gives a breakdown of "Social Insurance and Retirement Receipts". That's the same title used in Table 2.2 for what I showed as yellow on Graph #2.

Actually you can get Table 2.4 from the same "Historicals" page where I got Table 2.2. I guess it's easier to search with Google than it is to read two more lines on a list of table names. Oh, well.

Anyway, Table 2.4 shows things like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and old age and survivors insurance. Stuff that comes out of your paycheck when they take your taxes out, and stuff that your employer pays because you are employed. Stuff that, from the employer's point of view, is a cost associated with hiring. A labor cost.

To my mind these costs, these taxes, ought to be lumped in with our income taxes. Not always and forever. But just so we can take a gander at it.

Gander away:

Graph #3