White House website skews deficit numbers ahead of national tour

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.

When asked about these choices, Brian Deese, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, said interest payments are shown on one of the final lines. “The net interest figure on the receipt reflects … what is borrowed,” he said, adding “I don’t think there was any effort to avoid that reality.”

The second-to-last line of the online receipt does show 7.4 percent of the family’s income taxes, or $19, being used to pay the interest on existing debts owed by the federal government.

But in 2010, $414 billion was paid out as interest to debt-holders using funds from Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes and income taxes. That’s roughly $1,380 per person.

The site also shows a family with two kids and an income of $80,000 paying $285 on federal interest payments, and a single parent with one child and an income of $35,000 paying $39 on interest payments. In reality, the two-child family’s share of national interest payments is 19 times larger than shown, and the single parent’s share is 71 times larger than the site acknowledges.

Interest payments are expected to rise sharply in the next few years in step with interest rates and the growing national debt, now $14,300 billion. “Once interest rates come back, these costs will go up, a lot,” said Williams.

Deese did not answer when asked if White House officials would upgrade the site to show more information.

A White House press release announcing the new website contained a statement from the president declaring that “The American people deserve to know exactly how and where their tax dollars are being spent. The first official taxpayer receipt will give American families the ability to see exactly where their tax dollars are going. This new tool reflects our commitment to changing the way Washington works and making government more accountable to America’s families.”

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