Taxes and national debt: Ask now what the future holds

OK, so you met Monday’s deadline and paid your income taxes. Now would be a good time to ask yourself a couple of questions.

First, what will the federal government do with your money. And second, will you be paying more or less after the next president takes office?

Before we begin working on the answers, let’s recognize one thing the federal government can do that you can’t.

That would be spending way more than you take in, creating mountains of debt year after year after year — seemingly without facing the consequences of such behavior that would befall us mortals.

Thanks to newly released statistics published by the Heritage Foundation, we have a way to relate to the almost doubling of our nation’s debt that has occurred during the administration of Barack Obama with the help of both political parties in Congress.

If you earned the median family income of $54,000 last year and spent like the government, you would have spent $61,000 and added another $7,000 to your personal debt, which had already grown to about $260,000.

Even though you have a good job, your lack of restraint in spending will soon land you in bankruptcy, if it hasn’t already done so.

Seemingly the federal government faces no such outcome, because it can cover its debt by issuing still more of it and leaving it up to future generations to deal with.

Such foolishness is incomprehensible, but maybe you don’t think about it. Maybe you should — and that brings us to the question of what the government is doing with your money.

Heritage explains: “In 2015, major entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare and other healthcare programs — consumed 52 percent of all federal spending.”

Funding for our national defense declined to 16 percent, while federal employee retirement and disability, unemployment compensation, food and housing assistance and other federal income security programs made up another 18 percent of spending.

Interest on our nation’s ever-burgeoning debt amounted to 6 percent of disbursements, transportation another 2 percent, education costs came to 1 percent and the remaining 4 percent covered all other expenditures.

So, there’s where your tax money went. That is, if you actually paid any taxes on your income. More than 45 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax.

Middle-income families fund just over 4 percent of income tax revenues while the richest 20 percent are paying almost 87 percent of income taxes.

Now you may want to consider what the future holds after our new president moves into the White House.

After their landslide victories in New York last Tuesday, it appears that person will be either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

True to Democrats’ determination to grow government ever larger, Clinton agrees with her now practically vanquished socialist opponent that taxes should be raised via a redistribution scheme that is popular among voters acting on their self-interests.

Trump has published a plan for tax relief that simplifies the tax code and provides the lowest tax rate since before World War II.

It also includes a reduction in taxes on businesses large and small, designed to encourage investment and job creation for our troubled economy.

Such tax policy leads to more revenue for the federal government and potentially a reduction in our nation’s debt.

Even Democrats liked that formula in the Kennedy administration. But then, our objective was to “ask not what your country can do for you” — a concept now all but abandoned as we are lured ever more by the siren song of government’s promise to take care of us.

This story was originally published April 22, 2016 at 6:17 PM with the headline "Taxes and national debt: Ask now what the future holds."