With two more months left to go in the fiscal year, the feds are on a roll. Tax revenues for the first ten months of the fiscal year topped a record $2,672,414,000,000 (report downloads as a pdf).
Those numbers represent almost 8% in growth of tax revenues over those collected in 2014. In pure dollars, the difference is $197,536,000,000 from one year to the next. Adjusted for inflation, the numbers are a little less dramatic, with a difference of about $177,652,170,000.
It’s not a fluke. Revenues have been on pace to set records for the fiscal year since the get go. Dollars collected in 2015 have surpassed those collected in 2014 for every month except February (traditionally, those who owe taxes aren’t early filers and higher tax bills may have encouraged taxpayers to delay payment).
Most of the revenue came in the form of individual income tax – no surprise there. Individuals paid $1,276,630,000,000 in federal taxes, about five times more than corporations paid ($266,068,000,000). Excise taxes and estate taxes were also higher (since I know you’re wondering, estate and gift taxes totaled $16,422,000,000, up from $16,163,000,000).
Why the boost? Changes to the Tax Code, including the Net Income Investment Tax and the Medicare tax surcharge, have all helped nudge tax dollars north.
There’s more bad news. Despite the fact that we’re paying the government more money, those dollars aren’t necessarily spending down our debt. To date, we’ve made outlays of $3,137,953,000,000 compared to just $2,935,364,000,000 over the same time period in 2014 ($2,958,947,500,000 adjusted for inflation).
(All of those zeroes are the in story above to prove a point – but I’ll make it easier for you going forward.)
So where are those dollars going? For 2015, we’ve made outlays of a whopping $738 billion on Social Security and $477 billion for Medicare. If you want to know why that’s concerning, consider this: we only received $894 billion over the same time period in Social Security and other payroll tax funding.
What else takes up a lion’s share of the budget? We paid out $496 billion in defense spending and $398 billion on health spending. We also spent a noteworthy $209 billion on net interest alone to pay back our debt.
Despite the consistent growth month over month, the fiscal year isn’t over yet. We won’t know the actual totals for two more months. The fiscal year for the federal government runs from October to September. Collections and outlays are published each month as part of the Treasury’s Monthly statement.
