White House Releases Tax Receipt Calculator

Borrowing a really good idea, the White House has released its own tax receipt calculator to let Americans learn where their tax payments are going.

The calculator set up by the White House breaks down taxpayer expenses into categories -- Social Security, Medicare and discretionary spending. The discretionary spending is then divided by percentage for expenses paid on everything from the highest expenses like national security and health care to federal assistance to payments for the needy, education and job training, agriculture and interest on the debt, among other programs.

The calculator offers examples for five categories of taxpayer, all of whom do not itemize and can claim Making Work Pay and, where applicable, child tax credits.  Married couples with two children earning $80,000 is the highest bracket.

But everyone can refer to his or her own individual tax returns to see what was paid out in Social Security, Medicare and income tax. Insert the numbers into the respective windows on the site and the calculator will spit out the percentage breakdown.

FoxNews.com also offers calculators broken down by taxpayer bracket to determine contributions to specific programs whose costs are known.