It’s a conversation around plenty of folks’ dinner tables: their tax money and where it goes. We love to argue about where it should go; that’s something that everyone has an opinion about. Whether you’re in favor of certain government programs or want to see them abolished, if you have strong views about the financing of our military or funding wars, or don’t much care where your tax dollars go as long as you’re making a decent wage – we all have ideas about government spending and for most of us, we vote accordingly.
But have you ever taken the time to really imagine where a lot of the trillions of dollars in government spending are ending up after the public funding, the social programs, the military, etc? Have you ever considered how much money ends up back in the private sector?
Of course with government spending on such a huge scale, there’s going to be fraud. There will be outright thievery. Money will be mismanaged. These things happen…but the sheer amount of taxpayer dollars that end up back in the public sector might shock you. It happens in every aspect of public spending, from healthcare to education, from military spending to public assistance programs. And the ones skimming off the top might not be who you think it is.
There are many economic and legal professionals who are working hard behind the scenes to combat fraud and corruption in the government. But it can often seem like an uphill battle. It forces us to all ask a question: how is the bulk of our money really being spent, and how private can a company truly be if it’s receiving public funding?
Infographic Source