November 1, 2012

Federal Taxes by Source 1934 to 2011

Today less than half of the federal tax revenue comes from individual income taxes.   Nearly a third of the revenue is from the payroll taxes for social security and medicare.   The rest is a combination of corporate, excise and other taxes.

I got the historical data from the White House Budget pages.   I pulled the numbers from the 2013 fiscal year budget and only used up to 2011 which is the latest full year of data (not including future estimates).

Here's how the tax revenues look going all the way back to 1934:



I'll also break it into the first few decades :


And the most recent 50 years :


I'll also show it in percentages of the whole :


Now all the numbers above are actual dollar values before looking at inflation or anything.   TO put these figures into perspective of the changing economy, lets look at the tax sources as percentage of GDP :

Putting it in relation to GDP makes the changes of the past 70 years a lot less dramatic.  

--

Blog Widget by LinkWithin