Are you protected? Do you need to be?
Credit: Jürgen Fälchle/Fotolia
Psst. Very few Americans – just 1 in 5 according to CNN – know about the newly established Bureau of Consumer Protection. Boring name, I know, but it aims to protect consumers and as a savvy spender you should know how it can help you.
The BCP covers seven areas, including advertising practices, consumer and business education, enforcement, financial practices, marketing practices, planning and information, and privacy and identity protection. Its website says:
Here’s a nifty graphic from Turbo Tax that shows where your taxes go.The chart singles out 11 categories that benefit from taxes, including national defense, international affairs, and health care. Using data from Salary.com, the chart shows for 10 different jobs the average salary, the average tax bill as a percentage of income, and the average tax bill as paid in dollars.
At the top of the heap you have the CEO, who makes $643,846 and pays 34 percent of his income (some $215, 734) in taxes. At the bottom is the janitor, who makes $28,245 and pays 16 percent of his income (some $4,585) in taxes . Strangely, all the workers depicted are men, unless those are burly cross dressing women.
A pie chart next to each job description shows how many dollars go towards each of the recipient categories. The dollars figures are different for each job but the percentages that goes to each category is the same. Note that military spending is by far the biggest recipient of our tax dollars, followed distantly by health and a nondescript category labeled “other.”
I highly recommend checking out this chart that shows where you tax dollars go.
