Tax Day 2011 is Monday, April 18. But where does all our money go? What are all those IRS checks for?
Here are five ways to look at our tax receipt and the way our tax dollars are used to define our national values. In the gallery below, I've also included a handful of images that dive deeply into the question, How Much Money Do We Fork Over? and How Is the Money Spent?
The receipt speaks for itself. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest and Middle East wars accounts for the vast majority of our budget. The upshot: Cutting foreign aid and making senators take a pay cut snips insignificantly from the total receipt.
2. The Policy Breakdown
This useful and straightforward chart comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Note that under the category of "benefits," we can list Social Security (20%), Medicaid/Medicare/CHIP (21%), Safety Net Programs (14%) and Benefits for Federal Retirees and Veterans (7%). That amounts to 62% of the budget dedicated to preserving quality of life for old, disabled and sick people.

3. The Big Picture
To continue where I started here, 50 years ago, defense
spending made up 40 percent of government. We spent five times our
current share on infrastructure, and twice as much on research and
development. For every dollar we spent on health care, we spent two
dollars on education. America was a younger country then, and younger
countries invest in their future. We've become an old, rich country, and we've done what old rich households do: Focus on preserving our wealth and health. More and more of our money goes to preserving wealth rather than investing in it.
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