New White House Website Attempts to Hide the Decline

Obama wants you to think your federal tax dollars are being well spent, but he's not giving you the truth in a new White House website:

White House officials have unveiled a taxpayers’ “Federal Tax Receipt” website to goose publicity for a week of presidential speeches on the deficit, but the online receipt hides the president’s deficit spending and conceals the growing national debt.

But interest payments actually cost the nation $414 billion in 2010, according to the Treasury Department. That’s roughly $1,380 per person, or $4,140 for a family of three, or 218 times more than the White House website shows. ...

The webpage, at whitehouse.gov/taxreceipt, allows people to plug in their tax payments to see how their income taxes are spent among up to 34 accounts, such as “health care,” housing assistance” or “atomic energy defense activities.”

The site obscures President Obama’s use of borrowed funds, which amounted to $1,293 billion in 2010. That federal deficit was a third of the $3,552 billion spent by the federal government, and about 50 percent more than was paid in taxes.

The webpage hides the deficit by allocating Social Security and Medicare taxes entirely to those entitlement programs. In practice, those taxes are commingled with income, corporate and excise taxes, and are used to pay entitlement programs and the various discretionary programs, such as defense and education. The separation “is a little misleading,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a left-of-center advocacy group. “They are [separate] in law; they are not in fact,” he said.

The choice to separate the taxes skews the numbers. For example, the website offers the example of a family with one child and $50,000 in income. The family pays $3,100 in Social Security taxes, $725 in Medicare taxes and only $260 in income taxes, the website says. The site reserves the Social Security and Medicare for those two entitlements, and then uses the family’s incomes taxes of $260 to pay for the federal government’s other 34 spending categories. For example, according to the website, national security got 26 percent of the family’s income-tax dollars in 2010. and NASA got 0.7 percent.

The site “doesn’t give you a true sense of government’s cost … [because income] taxes don’t cover the cost,” said Nick Kasprak, an tax analyst at the Tax Foundation, a right-of-center advocacy group. The full cost isn’t even covered by all three types of taxes because the government is borrowing more than $1,000 billion a year, he said.

You didn't expect the truth, now did you? What's also not included are the billions going to Democrat special interest groups which in turn funnel that money back to Democrat candidates. It's all a giant Ponzi scheme.