Taxcheck

GO TO

13 May 2010Taxcheck uses the 2010/2011 budget forecast to estimate how your tax dollars will be spent.

Taxcheck.com.au has nothing to do with any Australian government or agency and is intended for illustrative purposes only. The data used has been sourced from the 2010/11 Federal Budget papers and Portfolio Statements, available at www.budget.gov.au (conflation of data from different tables may have led to minor categorisation errors). Estimates of income tax liabilities are calculated through a naive application of 2010/11 marginal income tax rates, with no accounting for the Medicare Levy, Low Income Tax Offset, Family Tax Benefits, or other potentially relevant factors. For a far more thorough estimation procedure, see the Australian Tax Office’s tax calculator. The individual contribution to spending on each item in the above table is calculated as tax paid multiplied by that item’s share of total federal expenditure. The “implied borrowing on your behalf” figure is calculated as the individual’s proportional contribution to total federal revenue multiplied by forecast net federal borrowing in 2010/11, and could be interpreted (in very broad terms) as an estimate of the present value of the future tax payments that will be required from that individual to repay the 2010/11 deficit.

Note that income taxation provides only around half of total Federal Government revenue. Other major revenue sources include the GST, corporate taxes, excise taxes, superannuation taxes, tariffs, and so on. Thus total direct and indirect contributions to federal spending could potentially be multiple times higher than the values listed above, especially when an individual’s income is relatively low. In addition, beyond where categories have been distinctly labelled, no attempt has been made to account for independent revenue raising or spending by state or local governments.