Average Cost per Taxpayer (eg, COVID)

Post #1353

NOTE: A related post is found here.

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When governments spend money on projects, a good question to ask is:

How much did it cost per taxpayer?

Taxpayers are “ultimately” on the hook for paying for government projects, even if the money does not change hands in the near term, because government spending will eventually be paid for out of reductions in the purchasing power of taxpayers. For COVID, more than $11 trillion was spent by the U.S. government:

[click to enlarge]

When you sum up the blue subtotals, then you discover that the government spent $11.475 trillion on COVID. But how much is that per U.S. taxpayer? Here is a side-by-side contrast of 3 historic government projects — the channel tunnel between England and France, a dam in Brazil, and a jet in Germany — along with the COVID “project”:

NOTE: The “Chunnel” was a public-private partnership and the private part needed debt forgiveness by around 2007, because the project was not paying for itself.

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Spending more than $72,000 per U.S. taxpayer is a big deal. Many billionaires were created or boosted during COVID, as middle-class families suffered losses. In 2020, median personal income was just under $36,000:

The median personal income in 2020 was $35,850 and COVID spending — on a per-taxpayer basis — was more than twice that. Government should not be able to spend so much money without a proper accounting, because it could represent a massive wealth transfer to elites from the middle class and lower classes.

It could also be used in order to set up a means of “population control.”

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End Note

Estimates of taxpayer base use 48% of the population for the year of completion of the project (if in the past), as derived from that 48% of the population in the USA who filed taxes for tax-year: 2019. Each country’s population was multiplied by 0.48 to get the estimated taxpayers.

UK + France in 1994 had about 56 million taxpayers in total
Brazil in 1982 had about 92 million taxpayers
Germany in 2023 had about 40 million taxpayers
USA in 2020 had about 158 million taxpayers (i.e., U.S. population * 0.48)

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Reference

[$11.475 trillion spent on COVID] — https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/

[cost of tunnel under English Channel (“Chunnel”): $22.4 billion] — https://integrarecruitment.co.uk/the-top-10-most-expensive-construction-projects-in-the-world/

[cost of hydroelectric dam in Brazil: $56.7 billion] — https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/the-worlds-most-expensive-government-projects/ss-BB1jiK5r

[cost of new jet fighter in Germany: $43.4 billion] — https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/the-worlds-most-expensive-government-projects/ss-BB1jiK5r

[median personal income in USA (2020): $35,850] — U.S. Census Bureau, Median Personal Income in the United States [MEPAINUSA646N], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N