The US government spent about that much money in its latest "discretionary budget".
The discretionary budget is the amount you can actually play around with -- beyond the mandatory spending on
Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt, and so forth. How would you spend it?
You'll be working in billions. Have fun.
Tax Tweaker
You may alter the total amount of revenues by playing with the
rate sliders on various tax brackets.
Top 0-1% (AGI $1.52T/AVG $1.12M)
Top 1-5% (AGI $1.2T/AVG $222K)
Top 5-10% (AGI $915B/AVG $136K)
Top 10-25% (AGI $1.8T/AVG $89K)
Corporate Taxes (average effective)
Payroll Taxes (average)
What can I tell you? These numbers are basically reasonable approximations. The different income strata, tax rates, and revenues produced are all roughly correct at their default starting
values (from taxfoundation.org).
The AGI in the table is the total Adjusted Gross Income for each group.
AVG is AGI divided by number of returns in that income group.
Corporate taxes are based on the "average effective" rate
rather than the (higher) nominal rate; it's more real life.
No attempt has been made to predict changes in economic activity as the tax rates change.
Revenue sources not listed have been lumped into the total revenue calculation as an unchangeable fixed sum.
In short, as an economic model, it lacks a certain precision and I hope the government doesn't rely entirely on us.
On the other hand it's quite good educational fun and hopefully gives some simplistic but useful sense of the basic parameters governing
budgets, deficits, surpluses, and most importantly, social priorities.
The People's Budget Summary
Number of budgets submitted:
Average total spending:
Average revenue collected:
Average :
Average tax rate on top 0-1%:
Average tax rate on top 1-5%:
Average tax rate on top 5-10%:
Average tax rate on top 10-25%:
Average effective corporate tax rate:
Average payroll tax rate:
The People's Budget shows the combined average results of everybody's submissions.
Submissions are logged by IP address and only one submission is allowed per day.
You can reload the page and make a new submission, but it will overwrite your last one. So, if you wish to
change something, you have the ability to revise, but you can't sit there and subvert the democratic
process by sending in loads and loads of submissions. Leave the subversion of democracy to the
professionals: your elected representatives!