Discussion on answer by ohwilleke: Total tax burden on the average American and how has it changed over the years

"Average" can refer ambiguously to any measure of central tendency. But you are right. The median tax spend is the tax spend of the average (or middle) taxpayer. Take care not to confuse the average (or mean) amount of tax with the tax of the average (or middle) tax payer. They are different things. You can avoid the ambiguity in the word "average" by taking care to use use "mean" or "median" as appropriate.

One problem with your data is that it shows the total tax, and so it shows the average tax. But it doesn't show that tax of the "average person". It is likely to be different. For example, the earnings of the average person are not the same as the average earnings. This is a mean/median difference.

@JonathanReez I'm struggling to understand your comment. Do you consider it a bad thing that 40% of the "productivity" (I guess you mean GDP?) is spent on government programs? Do any of the graphs show that, or is that an unrelated statistic? What makes the first graph worse in your opinion?

@JonathanReez Perhaps you should indicate which government services need to be done away with. Education? Social security? Defense? Unemployment insurance? Debt interest? Prisons? That's the problem with at least the current Republican approach to this issue: tax cuts, without spending cuts, end up causing more deficit, with ever greater % being diverted to debt servicing. As it is, governments are expected to do a whole lot more, in 2023, than they were doing in 1923, so their tax base needs to be deeper.

@ItalianPhilosophers4Monica Education is definitely overfunded at all levels - i.e. college should not be subsidized for non-STEM majors. Defense being overfunded is not even controversial. Social security and other welfare programs could use a big cut as they're not sustainable at current birth rates. And I agree that expenses need a drastic cut to balance the budget. And something like 30% of government workers could probably be fired without anyone noticing.

@JonathanReez It is worth keeping in mind that when government collects taxes and uses it to pay for, say health care, that lots of this is just a financing mechanism. Government health care spending goes predominantly to private sector health care providers. If employers had a mandate to provide private health insurance for their employees and retirees it wouldn't show up on the public sector books at all but would be functionally quite similar. Similarly, if you reported Social Security on a tax net of benefits basis it would look much smaller.

@ohwilleke the problem with government spending is that it takes away the people's decision power. If healthcare is universal and tax-funded, one can no longer make a choice to forego healthcare in exchange for some other good. If Social Security is mandatory, one can no longer invest their money elsewhere or forego their pension entirely. And millions of individual choices are (almost) always better than a few singular choices by a centralized power.

@JonathanReez But the calculus changes if you adopt as foundational principles that no one should die or be seriously harmed from lack of health care, or from lack of funds to meet their basic needs when they can't work. You could deal with those issues with means tests, but universal health care and universal basic income for seniors and disabled people and their dependents (which is what SS is in addition to being a retirement program) may be administratively more efficient ways to achieve these ends.

@JonathanReez Also, in the case of Social Security, part of the point (totally unrelated to the policy desirability of the program) is that an arbitrary accounting presentation rule (i.e. to report the total program cost in the budget percentages on a gross or net basis) makes a huge difference in the percentage and so the raw number shouldn't be taken too seriously. Lots of other programs (e.g. the USPS, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AMTRAK, TVA, profits from printing currency) are reported on a net basis, rather than a gross basis.

@JonathanReez Health care, in an US context, is an extremely bad showcase for government inefficiency. pgpf.org/blog/2023/07/… The US spends close to 2x as much as other Western countries with universal healthcare. About half of that is private money, the other half is public money. Nothing wrong with worrying about (frequently true) government inefficiency, but the US's private health care system is the poster child of a free market gone awry, even purely from a cost basis. Dogmatism shouldn't beat pragmatism.