Interest on debt ($200B) is equal to about 22% of the amount collected in personal income taxes ($900B).
While I hate to recommend wiki, there are a couple nice pie charts near the top of the page on the federal budget that might help.
BTW, there are about 100,000,000 actual taxpayers (by taxpayer I'm referring to tax returns filed which show positive tax payment, so a married couple will count as one "taxpayer" in this example) in the US. Restating the numbers above in terms of 'per taxpayer', the government borrows about $14,000 per year, while spending $35,000, of which $2000 is needed for interest payments.
Or, if you want to consider how the gov't spends your money in dollars per hour, that's about $7.00 per hour borrowed, $17.50 spent, and $1.00 on interest.
As a percentage of average household income, 28% of what "you" make is borrowed so the gov't can spend 70%. "Only" 4% of what you earn is needed to pay debt interest.
You know, when I look at it in these ways, I wonder. Is my math that bad, or are we thoroughly hosed?
“You know, when I look at it in these ways, I wonder. Is my math that bad, or are we thoroughly hosed?”
We’re thoroughly hosed! Thank you for taking the time to post that back to me and for all of those statistics/numbers. I really like the breakdown you gave. I like to think about things in terms of man hours (or other real world measurements) when the number is too big to be able to comprehend. I don’t think there is a person alive who can fully grasp a number like 150 Trillion dollars, etc. So when you put things in the terms of dollars per hour per person and things like that, i really appreciate it. I think one reason that these numbers get more and more grandiose is because the people running the show know that after a certain point, people no longer understand nor really care. The math goin on here is literally mind boggling. And I just read your clear and easy to understand post, again, and again, Thank you!
This works out the the same as the government's gross borrowing numbers, about $1T per year, over 1/3 of total annual spending. And you are right. We are hosed.