The 25th anniversary of the first web page led to a discussion of tax revenue. It was a question of whether or not the DotCom companies had led to a significant increase in tax revenue. We looked at tax revenue from 1960 to now. There are two peaks in the data one ending in 2000, the so called dotcom bubble and another in 2008, which was the end of the housing bubble. You can see the recessions and booms in the tax revenue data.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that the government will bring in $3.655 trillion in taxes for the 2017 tax year, which is nearly 40 times the 92.5 billion taxes collected in 1960. It is also more than a $200 billion increase over the taxes brought in last year.
The majority of this money comes from individual taxpayers. Nearly half of the taxes come from income taxes and another third come from payroll taxes. The remainder of the money comes from taxes on corporations, tariffs on imports, and other sources.
The taxes only are a portion of the money that the federal government spends. They currently spend more than $500 billion in addition to what they receive in taxes. This spending over the taxes received adds to the national debt, which is currently over 19 trillion dollars.