Where are your tax dollars going, anyway?

Tomorrow is Tax Day. Everyone’s favorite day of the year. Or not.

“Most people would like to forget and not think about taxes generally,” said Dorothy Brown, at Georgetown University Law School. “And then April 15th comes around and they’re like, ‘Ugh.’ It’s like, I'm at a reception, and somebody says, ‘What do you do?’ And I go, ‘I'm a tax law professor,’ and, you know, sometimes I could clear the room.”

Doing your taxes can be stressful. Going through your W-2 and seeing, in black and white, how much of your hard-earned salary went straight to the government doesn’t always feel great, especially if you’re struggling with your bills. It can be easy to forget what it’s for.

“It pays for health insurance. It pays for Social Security. It pays for food stamps. It pays for school lunches. It pays for science and medical research,” Brown said. “If you want another medical breakthrough, your tax dollars go to support that. It goes to pay for the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit.”

That’s why Elaine Maag, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, feels differently than most. “I'm excited to pay taxes,” she said. “I think that government touches all of us, and it takes care of things that I think are important.”

Maag finds it helpful to think about the breakdown of where her money’s going, like the roughly 23% that goes to Social Security.

“These are benefits we promise to people. They've typically paid for many, many years working, and they expect them in retirement,” she said.

Another nearly 24% pays for health care. Medicare, primarily, “which, again, this is a promise we've made to people — as they age, we're going to put them into public health care,” Maag said. But also Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program for low-income families, along with what’s left of those Affordable Care Act subsidies.

“The next category is we spend 14% just on interest on the debt,” she said. “And this is important because it's the fastest growing category.”

Another 13% or so is divvied up among social safety net programs like food assistance or SNAP, veterans’ benefits, unemployment benefits, and child nutrition programs. Another 14% roughly goes toward what’s called non-defense discretionary spending — things like housing, transportation, education, and the environment.

The last roughly 13% pays for defense. Or, at least it did before the war. “These numbers are all before we went into Iran,” Maag said. “So that number is going to be a lot bigger at the end of the year.”

How much bigger, no one knows yet.

The other thing most people don’t think about, and might be surprised by, is how much our taxes don’t cover, said Erica York, vice president of federal tax plicy at the Tax Foundation.

“People might feel like they're taxed a lot right now, but when you compare all of the tax revenues that the federal government generates, it falls short of how much the federal government spends,” she said. “In our most recent fiscal year, taxes covered just a little bit less than 75% of total spending.”

More Tax Day stories

• More Americans are becoming interested in tax resistance

• For many, bigger tax refunds will be pumped into gas tank

• States are trying to tax millionaires and billionaires. Will their proposals be effective?

• Filing your taxes? Don’t overlook these potential savings

• A bigger SALT deduction is leading to bigger tax refunds for higher-income taxpayers