It’s tax season, and in this particular game show, you can’t win, but thanks for playing, and here’s a copy of our home game. It’s the National Budget Simulation — and it allows you to make the hard decisions that Congress refuses to make (and then to see what effect this has on the deficit).
The monetary cost of the Iraq war continues to climb — about $150 million every day at last count — so don’t forget to add that into your budget (like Bush did).
If you want to dig down into the nitty-gritty and you trust the Congressional Budget Office, here are their numbers on who pays taxes (by income level) and how much, arranged in “tables [that] show effective tax rates for the four largest sources of federal revenues — individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and excise taxes — as well as the total effective rate for the four taxes combined. The tables also present average pretax and after-tax household income; counts of households; and shares of taxes, income, and households for each fifth (quintile) of the income distribution and the top percentiles of households.” Note that this doesn’t include most of the effects of the recent tax cuts.
