Each year for Tax Day, my colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies release a tax receipt so you can learn where your taxes are actually going.
This year, you may be more worried about the price of eggs than your tax dollars. But with President Trump now urging a $1 trillion military budget, it’s worth thinking about what we’re already spending.
Last year, the average taxpayer paid $3,707 for weapons and wars. That’s the equivalent of 628 dozen eggs. So if you thought buying a dozen or two a week for your family was taxing, well, that’s just the beginning.
Yet the president and his allies in Congress are planning on spending more for war and mass deportations — and less on just about everything else.
And it is a war budget, make no mistake. President Trump has escalated bombing in Yemen and doubled down on providing weapons to Israel, raising the chances of a new, full-blown Middle East war.
The president is also flirting with war with China, both through his trade war but also more directly. Much of the Pentagon’s future spending is in preparation for a war with China.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and DOGE are supposed to save money. But look at what they’re cutting: the average taxpayer paid just $39 for USAID last year, the international aid program that DOGE eliminated. For the cost of just six dozen eggs per taxpayer, that saved millions of lives — including millions of children who are now at risk.
DOGE and the president have fired staff and cut programs at the National Institutes of Health that conduct lifesaving cancer research. To discover those cures, the average taxpayer paid $149 in 2024 — about 25 dozen eggs. Not a bad investment to help treat cancer.
The president also eliminated a program for museum and library funding for which the average taxpayer paid just $1.43 in 2024 — about three eggs. And the president is dismantling an agency called the Interagency Council on Homelessness that coordinates services to help end homelessness, for which the average taxpayer paid just one penny in 2024.
These are just average figures, so those with lower incomes are paying far less for these things. Either way, these aren’t the kinds of cuts you’d make if you were really looking to get the best bang for your buck.
Instead, you might start with weapons contractors. In 2024, the average taxpayer paid $1,430 for Pentagon contractors — the equivalent of 242 dozen eggs.
One of those contractors is SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. Indeed, SpaceX is benefiting from new Pentagon contracts while Musk takes his chainsaw to cancer research and homeless services. Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on earth.
Naturally, a $1 trillion Pentagon budget will open the floodgates for more money for contractors, who already get over half the Pentagon budget each year. Cutting that planned $1 trillion by 10 percent could pay to avert GOP plans to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamps over the next 10 years.
Or you could skip the president’s plans for mass deportations and detentions of immigrants. At $98 for the average taxpayer in 2024, this amount is set to balloon as Congress prepares billions in new funding for the president’s deportations of students, fathers, mothers, and even a U.S. citizen child seeking emergency cancer treatment.
The U.S. needs humane and commonsense immigration law, not an indiscriminate dragnet that scapegoats even legal residents for problems they had no role in creating. We could put that money back into threatened services like the NIH, local libraries, and ending homelessness — or all of the above, given how comparatively cheap those things are.
With many Americans struggling to afford the price of eggs, healthcare, and housing, the government can and should help with those real problems instead of creating new ones with new wars and new mass deportation plans.
Federal budgeting expert Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
